Of all the things that I rack my mind about when it comes to geopolitical risks, “China winning at AI” is not one of them.

Let’s put two items on the table. The first is that the panic in Washington and on Wall Street about Chinese AI is genuine — the Kimi K3 release two weeks ago has forced the American AI industry to face a market it was pretending would not arrive for another five years. The second is that the panic is entirely misdirected, because the thing they are afraid of losing is not a lead in artificial intelligence. It is pricing power in a commodity. What Beijing is doing to the American AI industry, whether Beijing intends it or not, is exactly what the American economy needs to survive the buildout that has been happening in its name.

I made the underlying case in The Capital is Misaligned and the Crash is Coming and in The Doomsday Moat. The technical and philosophical priors sit in Why I’m Betting Against the AGI Hype and LLMs Are Universal Translators, Not Universal Thinkers. I will not rehearse those pieces in full. The conclusion I need for this argument is narrow: the scaling paradigm is not going to deliver the transformations its current valuations require, the models are approaching the ceiling of their architecture, and the trillion dollars being spent on the assumption that they are not is a mispricing of the kind that ends economies. Every quarter the mispricing runs, the eventual damage grows.

Chinese open-source models are shortening the run.

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What has happened in the past year is not that Chinese engineers built better models than American engineers. It is that Chinese engineers built comparable models and gave them away.

Kimi K3, released by Moonshot AI two weeks ago, beat Anthropic‘s Fable 5 and OpenAI‘s GPT-5.6 in front-end coding evaluations and finished ahead of Opus 4.8 in Arena‘s broader text ranking, at 40 percent lower cost. The weights release tomorrow. DeepSeek, Z.ai, MiniMax, Tencent, and Xiaomi now hold the top five spots on OpenRouter by weekly token usage — that is the marketplace where developers pay to serve real production traffic, not the leaderboards where labs pay for press coverage. The share of tokens American companies route to Chinese models has held above 30 percent every week since early February and peaked at 46 percent. Before February the average was 11 percent. The AI startup Lindy moved 100 percent of its traffic from Claude to DeepSeek in June. Z.ai‘s GLM 5.2, released this spring, was the fastest-adopted model Vercel tracked all year.

Most of the engineers routing this traffic would prefer, on any given afternoon, to keep sending their tokens to Anthropic or OpenAI. They are not choosing to. The enterprise stack now sits behind routing layers — Vercel, OpenRouter, Cloudflare‘s AI gateway, half a dozen others — that shop every request to the cheapest model that clears the quality bar. Once quality parity holds within a margin, the routing layer picks on price, and nobody looks. The vendor decision has been abstracted away from the humans who used to make it, which is what commoditization always does. Preferred suppliers become interchangeable suppliers. Interchangeable suppliers become price-takers. One AI investor put the endgame plainly to Axios: open-source models will handle 95 percent of enterprise queries. The premium American labs will fight over the remaining five.

The five largest hyperscalers are on pace to spend more than one trillion dollars on AI-related capital expenditure across 2025 and 2026 combined. Four of them — Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft — are on track for as much as $725 billion in 2026 alone, roughly double last year’s pace, and Goldman projects their combined AI capex will exceed the GDP of Japan by the end of the decade. These commitments are already outpacing the hyperscalers’ earnings and free cash flow, forcing them into debt markets to cover the gap. The Bank for International Settlements — an institution not famous for its taste in drama — devoted a section of its 2026 Annual Economic Report to the resemblance between the current AI buildout and the investment manias that “ended with an eventual reversal in investment, inducing economy-wide recessions.”

The bond market is already pricing this. Credit spreads on Google, Amazon, and Meta widened this past week as fixed-income investors began demanding more compensation to lend to companies that were, eighteen months ago, considered capital fortresses. Mizuho told its clients on Friday morning that capex raises are “testing investor limits.” The equity market is telling the same story more quietly — the hyperscaler shares have decoupled from the chip stocks, and the divergence is being called “somewhat unsustainable” by JPMorgan.

The investment thesis behind the trillion dollars requires two things to be true. It requires the frontier to keep pulling away from the pack, so that whoever spends the most on training captures durable pricing power. And it requires the enterprise market to keep paying premium prices to rent that frontier capability by the token. Both requirements are being falsified in real time. The frontier is not pulling away — Chinese labs are matching capability within months and undercutting price by factors of five. And the enterprise market is not paying premium prices — it is routing its traffic through gateways that pick the cheapest model that works.

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The single largest variable in how much damage the AI buildout does to the American economy is how long the mispricing survives. The longer the illusion of pricing power holds, the more capital pours into stranded infrastructure, the more of the S&P’s market capitalization concentrates in seven stocks whose earnings will not materialize, the more of the grid gets rebuilt around load forecasts that assume the tokens keep flowing at monopoly prices, the more of the federal budget gets committed to subsidies and permitting exemptions premised on a national-security story that the technology itself does not support. Every quarter the story survives, the eventual write-down grows.

The dot-com bubble was survivable because the correction came fast enough to leave the rest of the economy standing. The housing bubble was catastrophic because the machine ran for years after the fundamentals had quit, until the assets on the balance sheet had metastasized into the balance sheets of every institution in the country. The current AI buildout is closer in shape to the housing bubble than to the dot-com bubble, because the capital being deployed is not venture capital taking marked risk on individual companies — it is investment-grade debt secured against hyperscaler cash flows, and it is passive index money flowing into the same seven stocks regardless of price. When that pops, it will not pop only inside a set of speculative bets. It will pop inside pension funds, target-date retirement accounts, corporate bond portfolios, and the credit ratings of every major infrastructure vendor in the country.

The Chinese labs are pricing the frontier into a commodity now — before the trillion becomes two, before the grid buildout locks in another decade of stranded capex, before another wave of retail investors gets pulled into the seven stocks at valuations the earnings will not vindicate. They are performing, from Hangzhou and Beijing, the falsification that American capital markets have refused to perform from New York. Every American institution holding the asset has a reason to keep believing. A lab giving away frontier-grade weights has no such reason. DeepSeek does not care about Microsoft‘s earnings multiple. Moonshot does not care whether Anthropic‘s last funding round marks cleanly. The correction is arriving from the one direction the story cannot manage — and it is arriving early.

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In June, the Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to suspend access to its two most advanced models for every foreign national, including Anthropic‘s own employees, on national-security grounds. Within a day, Zhipu answered by releasing a competing model — GLM 5.2 — for free. Eighteen days later, Washington withdrew the order and Anthropic began restoring access. The United States government reached for one of its most coercive economic instruments to protect the market position of a chatbot and folded in under three weeks because a Chinese lab gave its product away.

A moat that dissolves in eighteen days is not a moat. It is a story about a moat. And the industry knows this, which is why it is currently constructing a second story on top of the first.

I described the first story in The Doomsday Moat last week. Extinction risk was the argument the industry reached for once it became clear that the returns would not arrive on the schedule the valuations required. If your product cannot justify its capex by earnings, you can try to justify it by fear — the argument that these companies must be protected and subsidized and exempted from ordinary oversight because the alternative is the end of the species. That moat has been in place for two years.

China is the second moat, and it is the same moat wearing a flag. We cannot let the capital slow down, because China. We cannot enforce copyright against the training sets, because China. We cannot tax the compute, regulate the data centers, or ask when the returns arrive, because China. The Commerce Department’s aborted export order and the administration’s flirtation with banning Chinese open-source models outright are the moat being poured in concrete. A national-security argument has one great advantage over an earnings argument — it never has to survive a quarterly call.

The desperation is showing at the level of conduct. Anthropic spent the spring quietly deploying tracking code to surveil its own users, hunting for Chinese firms distilling Claude‘s outputs into rival systems. The industry’s own argument is now that its crown jewels can be extracted through a chat window — that a few million conversations with the oracle suffice to clone the oracle. A company confident that it is building a god does not argue that the god can be photocopied. The distillation complaint is an admission, filed publicly under the seal of a national-security concern, that the frontier confers no defensible advantage. The moat leaks by design, because the product is the leak.

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Suppose I am wrong about the ceiling. Suppose some architectural breakthrough lies past the scaling wall, and the nation with the largest installed compute base and the deepest bench of researchers gets there first. Then the race would matter, and the moat would be real, and the capital allocation would be defensible.

The reply is that this scenario indicts the current allocation just as thoroughly. The trillion dollars now flowing into hyperscaler data centers is not being spent on the assumption that a breakthrough is required. It is being spent on the assumption that scale itself is the breakthrough — that the next order of magnitude of compute, applied to the next order of magnitude of data, produces the next order of magnitude of capability, all the way to whatever the industry means by AGI this quarter. Capital positioned for a paradigm shift would be funding heterodox architectures, basic research on continuous learning, small labs with strange ideas, the kind of work that produces the shift instead of extending the paradigm. Capital positioned for scale-is-all buys land in Louisiana and gas turbines in Texas.

You cannot defend the buildout by appeal to a possibility the buildout’s own thesis denies. Either the current architecture reaches AGI, in which case there is no meaningful frontier lead to defend, because Chinese labs will match the capability inside a year and commoditize it. Or the current architecture does not reach AGI, in which case the trillion dollars is being spent to serve a market that will not exist at the scale the pricing assumes.

And the security concerns, where they are real, have real answers that do not require pretending the commodity is a crown. Running Chinese weights inside classified networks would be reckless — nobody serious proposes it. Enterprises with sensitive data will pay a sovereignty premium for American models or run open weights in their own inspected silos. The remedies are boring, targeted, and available. They do not require a national industrial policy organized around the survival of the SaaS margins of three or four companies.

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Here is what I rack my mind about. Not the models. Not who trains them. Not which flag flies over the server room.

I rack my mind about a country that has quietly restructured itself around the story that the models will pay for the buildout. GDP growth is being propped up by data-center construction. The power grid is being rebuilt around load forecasts that assume the tokens keep flowing at monopoly prices. Pension funds and index investors are concentrated in seven stocks whose valuations require the story to be true. State attorneys general are being pressured to stand down; permitting is being expedited; the Commerce Department, as we just watched, is being turned into a defender of specific corporate revenue models. The federal government has begun, as I argued in The Doomsday Moat, taking equity in the story itself — sovereign stakes, golden shares, a government converting its regulatory power into a shareholder’s interest in the bubble’s survival.

When the state owns the mania, the state defends the mania. And the instruments it reaches for will not be gentle, because the correction will not be gentle. This is what the second moat is being poured for. It is not being poured for a real threat from Beijing. It is being poured for the moment, some number of quarters from now, when the earnings do not arrive and someone has to be named as the reason. The moat rhetoric they have been rehearsing for two years will be sitting there, pre-loaded, wearing the flag.

That is the risk worth losing sleep over. The models were never going to hurt us. The story we built on top of them still might. And the country the story lands on is not a country that has been paying attention to how much of its constitutional order was convention all along. The economic dislocations arrive as politics. They arrive looking for someone to blame. And the people who inflated the bubble will be first in line with a candidate.

So no—”China winning at AI” is not on my list.

Go Deeper into the Circus

At some point early in the discussions, somebody at OpenAI proposed giving the United States government 5 percent of the company. The proposal has been presented as a public-spirited response to the extraordinary wealth artificial intelligence will create. Sam Altman and other OpenAI executives have reportedly discussed placing the stake in a public investment vehicle modeled on the Alaska Permanent Fund, through which ordinary Americans might share in the gains. At OpenAI’s reported valuation of $852 billion, the government’s share would be worth approximately $42.6 billion. OpenAI has suggested that other leading American AI companies should surrender comparable stakes.

It sounds generous until you ask why one of the most valuable private companies in the world is volunteering to place the federal government on its capitalization table. OpenAI is not known for surrendering control to the public. Its history has been a long migration away from the nonprofit structure through which it first claimed to hold advanced artificial intelligence in trust for humanity. The sudden enthusiasm for public ownership is a transaction, even if no cash changes hands.

The sovereign-shareholder model is already operating. Last August, Washington converted previously awarded CHIPS Act and Secure Enclave funds into an $8.9 billion investment and a 9.9 percent stake in Intel. Nvidia and AMD separately agreed to remit 15 percent of certain Chinese chip-sale revenues to the government in exchange for export licenses. The state has begun exchanging permission, subsidy, and protection for claims upon private technology companies.

OpenAI made its offer under pressure. It surfaced less than a week after the company delayed the broad release of GPT-5.6 at the government’s request and weeks after a coalition of 42 state attorneys general opened an investigation into the company. The offer is tribute as well as entanglement: political insurance offered to a government already demonstrating its capacity to interrupt the business. Anthropic, importantly, has held no comparable discussions with the administration. This is OpenAI’s proposal, not a position that can be imputed to the industry as a whole.

What OpenAI receives is more valuable than the equity it gives away. The federal government becomes a shareholder in the company’s valuation, a political participant in its continued solvency, and a beneficiary of the future returns OpenAI has promised but has not yet produced. A restriction that reduces OpenAI’s revenue would then reduce the value of a public asset. A competitor that displaces OpenAI would threaten an investment notionally held on behalf of every American. The regulator would acquire a financial interest in the regulated company before anyone had established that the company could earn returns commensurate with its valuation. This is not a conventional bailout. It is the architecture of a future bailout assembled in advance.

OpenAI wants the government on its capitalization table because of a problem the company cannot say plainly. The artificial-intelligence industry has promised economic returns that the technological roadmap it is following cannot deliver. The models will become more useful. They will reshape software and many forms of knowledge work. But they will not become the autonomous general intelligences required to justify the scale of investment now being made in their name, and much of the value they do create will be captured outside the companies paying to build them.

The industry did not invent the doomsday argument. Eliezer Yudkowsky was writing about artificial intelligence as a global catastrophic risk in 2008, and Nick Bostrom published Superintelligence in 2014, before the present valuations or companies existed. Geoffrey Hinton left Google so he could warn freely about dangers he sincerely believed the technology posed. The corporate AI industry found an intellectual tradition built in earnest and gave it a new institutional function. The gap between promised returns and attainable technology did not create the theology. It made the theology useful to capital.

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I have spent a great deal of time in these pages arguing about what large language models are. The argument has changed as the systems have improved, but its central conclusion has held. These models are extraordinary representational machines. They compress human symbolic production, translate between domains, generate useful artifacts, and allow a skilled person to move through accumulated knowledge at speeds that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. Their value is real, which is precisely why the financial distortion surrounding them is harder to see.

In Why I’m Betting Against the AGI Hype, I made the engineering case that the scaled-LLM roadmap faces a compound set of architectural barriers. Learning and inference remain separated. Catastrophic forgetting can worsen with scale. Energy requirements remain grotesquely different from biological intelligence. Systems that perform impressively within trained distributions remain brittle when forced to adapt continuously in an open world. The industry needs several independent breakthroughs to arrive together, at production scale, while spending remains economically supportable. My estimate was that scaled LLMs had between a 1 and 15 percent chance of producing AGI over a five-year horizon, dramatically below the probability embedded in market valuations.

The later argument in LLMs Are Universal Translators, Not Universal Thinkers clarified the category mistake underneath those engineering constraints. A model can translate between symbol systems, narrow domains, reorganize human knowledge, and produce fluent language without possessing judgment. It can show us the patterns through which human beings have discussed courage, grief, justice, or responsibility. It cannot experience what any of those words weigh, choose among the values they encode, or bear responsibility for the choice. Translation can improve indefinitely without becoming the conscious activity for which meaning matters.

I sharpened the point in Only Conscious Beings Can Reason Ontically. A language model has representations but no independent cognitive contact with what those representations are about. It has no ontic floor from which to discover that a plausible sequence of symbols has failed to describe the world. This is why hallucination persists even as fluency improves. The model becomes better at producing the surface form of reasoning while remaining categorically unable to know whether the representation it has generated is true because there is no subject inside the system standing in relation to a world.

The three objections describe the same failed roadmap at different levels. The engineering problems reveal an architecture being asked to perform functions it was not built to perform. The philosophical problem explains why adding more representations cannot bridge the gap. The economic problem follows because the industry has capitalized itself on the assumption that quantitative improvement will eventually produce a qualitative transformation. More compute can produce a better model. It does not follow that enough compute produces a mind, yet the entire investment structure depends upon pretending that it does.

The mistake would be easier to correct if the technology were worthless. A useless product produces a clean failure. Investors stop funding it, executives move on, and the capital finds another story. Large language models are useful enough to keep the story alive while being structurally incapable of delivering the particular future used to justify their cost.

The distinction matters. The internet was real during the dot-com bubble. Railroads were real during the railroad bubbles. Fiber-optic cable was useful during the telecom bubble. A bubble forms when capital is deployed on terms that the underlying technology cannot repay, not when the technology itself is imaginary. The product can transform society while destroying the investors who paid too much for the wrong part of the transformation.

That is the argument I made in The Capital Is Misaligned and the Crash Is Coming. Large language models radically reduce the cost of producing bespoke software. A competent engineer can now translate a business process into functioning software in a fraction of the time previously required. That is a profound technological revolution, but it threatens the software-as-a-service rents of the same hyperscalers and enterprise vendors financing the revolution. If a company can cheaply build a system fitted to its own workflows, the economic logic of paying perpetual per-seat fees for generic software begins to dissolve.

Inference creates a second problem. The current buildout assumes that enormous volumes of model use will continue flowing through hyperscaler datacenters, generating the cloud revenue needed to justify the chips, electricity, land, and financing. But quantization, distillation, specialized silicon, and better local hardware steadily move useful inference onto devices. The consumer who can run a sufficiently capable model on a phone or laptop has little reason to rent every interaction from a remote datacenter. The model remains valuable while the hyperscaler loses the toll.

The industry is building infrastructure for a transformation that attacks its own mechanisms of value capture. Models make software cheaper to produce, which weakens software rents. Models become cheaper to run locally, which weakens cloud-inference rents. Open models and falling inference costs commoditize capabilities that private laboratories need to keep scarce. The technology diffuses value through the economy while the capital structure assumes that a few firms will capture it.

AGI is the bridge across this contradiction. If the companies produce autonomous systems capable of replacing large portions of human labor, conducting science, operating firms, and recursively improving their own successors, then almost any present expenditure can be justified. The prize becomes so large that current revenue ceases to matter. A trillion dollars in infrastructure looks cheap when measured against ownership of the intelligence that will perform a substantial share of the world’s economically valuable cognition.

Without AGI, the arithmetic becomes ordinary again. The companies must earn returns from subscriptions, advertising, enterprise contracts, cloud services, and cost savings. They must explain why increasingly expensive models produce revenue that cheaper models cannot. They must show that customers will pay enough for inference to recover the cost of building and operating the infrastructure. They must confront the possibility that the most valuable use of their technology is to destroy the margins of businesses they already own. The technology is revolutionary. The returns promised to the people financing its present form are not there.

The financing now makes that absence harder to see because the industry has begun financing its own demand. Microsoft invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI, which became one of its largest cloud customers and later committed to purchase $250 billion in Microsoft cloud services. Amazon and Google invested in Anthropic, which in turn committed to using their cloud infrastructure and chips. Bloomberg’s map of these circular deals shows the same pattern across the industry: the supplier funds the customer, the customer spends the capital on the supplier, and the resulting revenue is received as evidence that demand independently exists.

Nvidia has brought the arrangement closest to self-parody. Its proposed investment of up to $100 billion in OpenAI was designed to arrive in tranches as OpenAI deployed Nvidia systems. When that deal failed to close in its original form, Nvidia moved toward a $30 billion equity investment whose proceeds OpenAI was expected to spend primarily on Nvidia chips. The chipmaker would finance one of its largest customers, the customer would return much of the money through chip purchases, Nvidia would report the revenue, and OpenAI’s increased computing capacity would support the valuation that made the investment appear prudent.

AMD devised an even more explicit loop. It issued OpenAI warrants for as many as 160 million AMD shares, vesting them as OpenAI’s purchases scale from one gigawatt of AMD systems to six, with additional vesting tied to AMD’s share price and OpenAI’s technical and commercial milestones. Nvidia, meanwhile, invested $2 billion in CoreWeave, a cloud company built on Nvidia infrastructure that plans to deploy more than five gigawatts of Nvidia-powered capacity. Nvidia has also agreed to buy $6.3 billion of CoreWeave’s cloud services. Capital, procurement, equity appreciation, reported demand, and future capacity have been wired into a single circuit.

These transactions are real, and each may be defensible when considered alone. The circularity lies in what they can no longer prove. Supplier-financed purchases do not establish the same demand as customers spending cash generated by economically productive use of the product. Equity warrants tied to procurement do not establish the same price signal as an unconflicted buyer choosing among vendors. The industry points to booked capacity and chip revenue as proof that the transformation is accelerating, while the financing behind those purchases depends upon the transformation eventually arriving. Telecom equipment makers used vendor financing to produce a similar illusion during the fiber buildout. The equipment was real, the networks were useful, and the demand had been pulled forward by capital that vanished when the promised revenue failed to appear.

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Every additional dollar committed strengthens the perverse incentive. The executives cannot revise the destination without impairing the assets built to reach it. They cannot tell investors that LLMs may become universal translation infrastructure rather than autonomous minds because translation infrastructure does not justify the same valuations. They cannot admit that local inference may consume the profitable edge of cloud inference after announcing datacenter plans premised on explosive demand. They cannot tell markets that the systems will improve incrementally after markets have priced them as the next industrial substrate.

Every participant behaves rationally within the trap. The hyperscaler CEO must invest because refusing to invest would be interpreted as surrendering the future to a rival. The portfolio manager must own the beneficiaries because underweighting them while the story rises is professionally dangerous. The analyst must extend the revenue curve because calling the top too early is more costly than missing it with everyone else. The journalist must cover each model release as a milestone on the road to AGI because the roadmap has become the organizing narrative of the industry.

No conspiracy is required. Everyone receives an incentive to preserve a proposition that nobody is individually positioned to falsify. The capital expenditure becomes evidence that the technology must be consequential because serious companies would not spend so much on an illusion. The rising valuation becomes evidence that informed investors believe the roadmap. The number of researchers working on alignment becomes evidence that the destination is near. Each institution points to the others as confirmation.

The system closes upon itself when it becomes too expensive to stop. Too much has been raised, ordered, built, promised, and priced. A modest reassessment of the technology would now produce an immodest reassessment of the companies. Executives who might once have admitted uncertainty become cornered rats defending the only path by which their previous commitments remain rational. The rhetoric must grow more extreme because the economics have not grown strong enough. Doomerism becomes useful here.

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Telling the public that your product may kill them is terrible marketing. It invites regulation, liability, labor resistance, consumer distrust, and the possibility that a government might respond to an extinction warning by prohibiting the dangerous activity. The doomsday narrative damages the back end of the business strategy, which is one reason I do not believe it began as a carefully designed industry-wide influence operation.

The primary audience is more opportunistic. To capital, the claim that a model may escape human control communicates power. Nobody creates an international safety institute for ordinary software. Nobody compares a customer-service tool to nuclear weapons. Nobody asks whether a better search engine will exterminate the species. The apocalypse is a capability claim carrying the force of a warning.

The investor hears that the scaling curve is real, the transformation is inevitable, and the company building the dangerous system occupies the frontier of the most important technology in history. The possibility of extinction certifies the magnitude of the opportunity. Even the critics who demand that development stop reinforce the premise that the asset possesses world-altering power.

The accelerationist promises that artificial general intelligence will transform everything. The doomer warns that artificial general intelligence may destroy everything. Their moral disagreement is real, but the investment thesis underneath it is identical. Both positions tell capital that scaled computation is approaching an intelligence with powers beyond ordinary economic measurement. The choice between paradise and extinction occurs after inevitability has already been conceded.

I argued in There Is No AI Apocalypse that the boom and the doom perform the same operation. The scaling hypothesis predicts that greater model capability should reduce the auxiliary human apparatus needed to produce competent output. The opposite has occurred. Frontier systems require expanding networks of human annotators, evaluators, domain experts, reinforcement-learning workers, and verifiers. Synthetic data cannot freely replace them without degradation, while self-play succeeds mainly where a reliable reward signal already exists. The field’s labor economics reveal increasing dependence on human intelligence at the same time its public story promises machine independence from it.

The doomsday story absorbs this failure. Growing human scaffolding becomes a temporary alignment requirement. Hallucination becomes evidence of an alien intelligence learning to deceive. Brittleness becomes unpredictability. A benchmark success demonstrates emergence, while a benchmark failure demonstrates that the system remains inscrutable. Every outcome is translated into a reason to finance the next scaling run.

The bull case says the model is becoming a god. The bear case says the model is becoming a demon. Nobody in the valuation conversation is permitted to say it is becoming a better tool.

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The money now surrounding the doomsday belief is real and substantially disclosed. Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI established a $10 million AI Safety Fund for research into frontier-model risks. It has distributed more than $5 million to eleven grantees. OpenAI committed £5.6 million to a British alignment program supported by Microsoft, AWS, and Anthropic, bringing the initiative’s total funding above £27 million.

None of this proves that researchers are being paid to reach conclusions dictated by the companies. Catastrophic-risk research is a legitimate field of inquiry, and many of its participants plainly hold their beliefs with great sincerity. Institutional influence rarely requires the vulgarity of a script. Money decides which questions support careers, conferences, institutes, journals, fellowships, and policy organizations. It allows one account of the technology to become durable enough that the existence of the field begins to serve as evidence for the premise that created it.

Anthropic is the clearest example because its executives appear to believe the warnings they issue. Dario Amodei told the Senate that advanced AI could pose “extraordinarily grave threats” to American national security and advocated mandatory testing before deployment. The company has supported increasingly strong state legislation while arguing that voluntary transparency is insufficient. Anthropic made two $20 million corporate contributions to Public First Action, a nonprofit policy organization, with the contributions barred from use to influence candidates. Separately, Amodei personally gave $1 million and five other Anthropic employees gave more than $2 million in total to the affiliated Public First super PAC.

I take Amodei’s concern seriously. Sincerity is part of what makes the system effective. Capital selects leaders whose convictions support continued investment, gives them the resources to build institutions around those convictions, and then points to their honest alarm as independent confirmation of the capability premise. The warning makes continued scaling appear responsible, the safety apparatus makes the company appear indispensable, and the company’s valuation gives the warning an audience. At no point must anyone consciously lie. Perverse incentives are more durable when they operate through honest people.

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Regulatory capture follows the valuation story rather than causing it. Once companies have described their systems as potentially apocalyptic, they need a political answer to the apocalypse. OpenAI’s leadership moved from “the possibility of existential risk” to a proposal for an international authority resembling the International Atomic Energy Agency. Systems above specified capability or compute thresholds would face inspections, audits, safety testing, and deployment restrictions. Microsoft endorsed licensing highly capable models and the datacenters used to develop and deploy them.

The companies define scale as the path to dangerous intelligence. Scale then becomes the threshold for regulation. The firms possessing the greatest concentrations of chips, electricity, datacenters, lawyers, safety researchers, and political access are naturally best equipped to comply with the rules. The European Union has already adopted a systemic-risk presumption tied to a training threshold of 10 to the 25th floating-point operations, a technical boundary that also happens to describe a class of firms.

This is the doomsday moat in its regulatory form. The private accumulation of scale creates the alleged danger. The danger justifies public restrictions. The restrictions certify the institutions that achieved private scale as the only responsible custodians of the technology. A startup can comply with ordinary consumer-protection and liability law. It cannot easily maintain a hundred-person alignment organization, negotiate national-security agreements, run constant catastrophic-capability evaluations, and satisfy an international licensing authority.

The industry is not unified around this strategy. OpenAI opposed California’s SB 1047, while Meta resisted binding safety rules and declined to join the famous extinction statement. Build American AI, a dark-money group linked to a super PAC backed by OpenAI president Greg Brockman and other technology investors, offered creators $5,000 per TikTok to deliver fear-based messages about China. At least one influencer labeled the post as an advertisement without disclosing the organization that paid for it. This was an anti-regulatory campaign, not a doomer campaign.

Opposition to regulation does not itself prove the existence of a doomsday moat. It proves that the industry is not operating through a single strategy, much less a coordinated conspiracy. The narrower claim is that catastrophic-risk rhetoric acquires a moat function when it is joined to licensing, compute thresholds, and compliance systems whose fixed costs established firms can absorb more easily than challengers. A faction organized around defeating those rules is evidence of a different political strategy, not additional evidence for the same one.

The claim must admit the possibility of being wrong. A frontier laboratory that accepts binding rules imposing substantial costs on its current systems, lowers rather than raises barriers for smaller competitors, and surrenders market power without receiving a compensating procurement advantage or government privilege would count against the moat. So would a safety position that produced a durable loss of valuation or market share without certifying the company’s capabilities or political importance.

The technical and economic argument has a clock as well. By July 2031, frontier models should still require expanding human evaluation and scaffolding to operate reliably in open-ended domains; useful inference should continue migrating toward cheaper and more local hardware; and revenue attributable to model use should remain insufficient to justify the industry’s infrastructure commitments at ordinary market rates. If scaled models instead learn continuously, operate autonomously across novel domains while reducing their dependence on human verification, and generate returns commensurate with the capital invested, then the central claim of this essay will have failed. Let the record score it.

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OpenAI’s proposed government stake converts technological determinism into a public financial interest. The company has accumulated private capital by arguing that artificial general intelligence is approaching. It has spent against a future in which intelligence becomes a service delivered from infrastructure it controls. The technology has improved, but the autonomous economic agents needed to justify the buildout have not arrived. Useful inference is becoming cheaper, more local, and more commoditized, while the cost of remaining at the proclaimed frontier continues to rise.

OpenAI cannot retreat to the claim that it has built a valuable tool. Valuable tools are governed by ordinary expectations about profit, competition, liability, and return on invested capital. OpenAI has been valued as the institution through which history will pass. If that claim weakens, the company does not merely lose prestige. The financing logic supporting its infrastructure, partnerships, and prospective public offering begins to fail.

So the company offers the government a piece of the prophecy. The public-wealth language asks Americans to imagine themselves as beneficiaries of gains that remain speculative. The equity stake asks Washington to treat the continuation of OpenAI’s valuation as a national interest. The state is invited to share the upside before the market has determined whether the upside exists, and by accepting the invitation it acquires a reason to prevent the downside.

An investor in both OpenAI and Anthropic told Axios the proposal was a political move to gain favor with the administration rather than a meaningful mechanism for sharing wealth with the public. The tribute reading is correct, but it understates the elegance of the proposal. A government shareholder does more than favor the company. It becomes institutionally entangled with the company’s survival. A collapse in valuation becomes a loss on the public balance sheet. Regulation that impairs OpenAI becomes regulation that destroys an asset notionally owned by citizens. The government does not have to transfer cash today. It only has to acquire an interest that makes transferring cash tomorrow appear responsible. This is how a speculative private project becomes too publicly owned to fail.

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The executives are now trapped between audiences whose requirements cannot be reconciled. They must tell investors that the systems are becoming powerful enough to replace large categories of labor, automate science, operate firms, and perhaps escape human control. They must tell customers that the products are reliable enough to purchase and safe enough to place inside consequential workflows. They must tell governments that the systems are dangerous enough to require the companies’ expertise but manageable enough to remain legal. They must tell courts that harms were unforeseeable after spending years warning that the technology could alter civilization.

The ontology changes with the audience. The machine becomes an uncontrollable alien when capital needs awe, a dependable assistant when customers need reassurance, a strategic national asset when government threatens restraint, and merely a neutral tool when liability appears. The contradictions are no longer rhetorical accidents. They are the different stories required to sustain a business whose technology, revenue model, capital requirements, and political position no longer fit together.

That is why the executives sound increasingly frantic. They cannot abandon inevitability without threatening investment. They cannot continue speaking of extinction without threatening their freedom to operate. They cannot admit that the roadmap may be wrong because uncertainty is fatal to a valuation premised upon destiny. The public sees inconsistent claims because consistency would require one of the audiences to hear the truth.

The models are useful and the capital is misaligned. The systems will change software without becoming conscious sovereigns. They will create enormous social value while failing to return that value to the companies in proportion to what those companies have spent. The infrastructure will remain useful after the valuation story breaks, just as fiber survived the telecom collapse and rail survived the railroad bubbles. The people holding the inflated claims will absorb the difference.

The industry has begun trying to transfer that difference to the public before it is recognized. The doomsday narrative makes the companies appear too consequential to ignore. The China narrative makes them appear too strategic to constrain. The government stake would make them too publicly entangled to permit to fail. We should refuse the sequence before its final step becomes inevitable merely because the industry says it is.

⁂

The politics become simpler once we reject the metaphysics embedded in the investment pitch. We do not need to believe that a language model will become a god before regulating the firms that build it. We do not need to solve alignment before enforcing antitrust law, protecting workers, assigning liability, taxing wealth, defending privacy, or governing the enormous demands datacenters place upon public infrastructure. Those are questions about present power exercised by identifiable human beings.

The doomsday story points beyond the horizon because the horizon is where the returns have been placed. It asks us to fear a machine that may someday escape its creators while the creators attempt to escape the ordinary disciplines of markets and democratic law. It turns a failed roadmap into a national emergency, a speculative valuation into a strategic asset, and the people who made the bad bet into the indispensable authorities on how the public must absorb it.

The technology will remain. It will become cheaper, more useful, more local, and more deeply integrated into ordinary software. That future does not require the companies currently building the largest datacenters to own the intelligence of the world. It requires us to understand what the systems actually do, where their value actually lands, and which institutions are trying to make their private exposure into our public obligation.

The doomsday belief may be sincere. Its function is now unmistakable. It tells capital that the capability is real, tells government that the company is indispensable, and tells the public that there is no time to deliberate about who should bear the cost. OpenAI is offering Washington a share of the future it promised. The offer is arriving because the future cannot pay the bill.

Go Deeper into the Circus

There is an argument beneath a great deal of modern scientific culture. It is rarely written down because, to the people who rely on it, it does not feel like an argument. It feels like the history of civilization.

Belief in God leads to superstition. Superstition hardens into organized religion. Organized religion acquires political power. Priests place Galileo under house arrest and burn lesser-known heretics whose names the story has forgotten. Science finally breaks free, abandons revelation, adopts naturalism, and puts a man on the Moon. Science has the better record on questions of truth. Therefore, when choosing a metaphysics, prefer the view that removes God, purpose, consciousness, and finally the observer from the foundations of reality.

Religious institutions have persecuted inquiry. Galileo was convicted of heresy and confined for the rest of his life. Scientific methods have disclosed features of the world that revelation never could. Rockets work. Antibiotics work. Semiconductors work. The equations survive encounters with reality that no theology has ever been required to survive.

The success of science establishes the power of its method and leaves physicalism unproven. A rocket arriving at the Moon confirms the physical theories used to build and navigate the rocket. It supplies no additional evidence that consciousness is produced by matter, that observers possess no ontological significance, or that the description of reality from outside experience is the only description that is real.

The rocket carried instruments, fuel, human beings, and the accumulated work of generations. No metaphysics was aboard.

⁂

Neil deGrasse Tyson once described the Galileo affair as his choice for “the trial of the millennium”. Galileo showed that the universe differed from the Catholic Church’s account; the Church tried him, convicted him, and sentenced him to house arrest. Tyson drew the line plainly: scientific claims rest upon experimental verification, religious claims rest upon faith, and the two offer “irreconcilable approaches to knowing.”

This is the Galileo story most scientifically literate people inherit. Carl Sagan told versions of it. Generations of science teachers and popularizers have told versions of it. The Church claimed authority over the heavens. Galileo looked through a telescope. Authority lost.

The history is more complicated than the parable. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s account of Galileo describes unsettled doctrine, Medici patronage, papal politics, the Counter-Reformation, the Thirty Years’ War, and a substantive dispute over whether astronomy described reality or merely supplied instruments for prediction. Galileo’s evidence for the motion of the Earth was not, at the time, conclusive. Some churchmen supported him. Some scientific contemporaries opposed him. The status of Copernicanism as heresy remained cloudy until the Church made its condemnation public through Galileo himself.

Historians of science have spent decades dismantling the simple warfare account. Ronald Numbers called permanent conflict between science and religion “the greatest myth in the history of science and religion”. He traced its familiar form to the nineteenth-century polemicists Andrew Dickson White and John William Draper, whose propaganda converted a complicated history into a civilizational battle.

Galileo’s opponents had grounds to dispute evidence that had not yet become decisive. They had no right to close the question by force. The Church claimed authority over what could be said about the physical universe and punished a man for refusing its terms. The machinery of coercive closure was the moral failure.

The institutional failure was epistemic closure backed by power. A hierarchy insulated certain propositions from revision, made fidelity to those propositions a condition of standing, and possessed coercive machinery with which to discipline dissent. Revelation supplied the protected propositions. Political authority supplied the danger.

The scientific culture that emerged from this history learned the correct institutional lesson: no proposition about the natural world may be protected from observation. It also learned another lesson, less carefully and more deeply. Any metaphysics that grants reality to mind, purpose, interiority, or God threatens to reopen the door through which the priests entered. The observer became a security vulnerability.

Trauma supplied the second lesson.

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The trauma produced a fundamental attribution error.

The metaphysical content of religious belief received the blame for failures produced by dogmatic institutions with coercive power. The metaphysical content of naturalism received the credit for successes produced by public methods designed to expose error. Both explanations erase the institutions that did the work.

The relevant achievements of modern science came from measurement, mathematical formalization, controlled experiment, reproducibility, prediction, open criticism, and the willingness to discard models that fail. None of these requires the proposition that only physical properties exist. A dual-aspect monist can calculate a trajectory. A panpsychist can run a double-blind trial. A Christian can sequence a genome. An atheist can falsify his own hypothesis. The method disciplines every practitioner in the same way because it does not ask what the practitioner believes reality is made of. It asks what the evidence permits the practitioner to say.

Philosophers distinguish methodological naturalism from ontological naturalism for exactly this reason. The methodological commitment grants science authority over the investigation of nature and excludes appeals to revelation from scientific explanation. The ontological commitment makes a claim about the contents of reality: nothing supernatural, mental, purposive, or otherwise irreducible to the physical belongs in the final inventory.

The methodological commitment can stand independently of the ontological one. Scientists of many religious and metaphysical persuasions perform the same experiments because the experimental method does not depend upon their ultimate ontology. A result obtained under methodological naturalism may embarrass a religious doctrine. It may render a proposed supernatural intervention unnecessary. Its success alone cannot transform a rule for inquiry into a complete account of being. Some philosophers argue that the record of methodological naturalism should still increase our confidence in metaphysical naturalism, even though the first does not entail the second. The amount of that increase depends upon which metaphysical hypotheses made the successful result more likely. Apollo is where the intuitive update becomes indefensible.

For centuries, the people invoking mind, soul, purpose, or God in explanations often were trying to stop the inquiry. The scientist learned to hear every metaphysical claim about interiority as an attempt to smuggle the bishop back into the laboratory. The suspicion was historically earned. It became indiscriminate.

The result is a peculiar inversion. Physicalism presents itself as the absence of metaphysics, the view left over after every speculative addition has been shaved away by Occam’s razor. Consciousness becomes the speculative addition, despite being the one feature of reality each of us knows through direct acquaintance. The external description becomes reality itself. The internal description becomes a problem to be explained out of it.

This is how a defensive institutional posture hardened into an ontology.

Apollo is neutral among metaphysical systems that accept the same physics.

Suppose physicalism and dual-aspect monism both predict that a Saturn V, built to the same specifications and governed by the same equations, will follow the same trajectory. The successful mission is evidence for the equations, the engineering, and the vast body of empirical knowledge on which both metaphysical positions rely. Because the two positions predict the same result, the mission cannot provide evidence for one against the other.

This is ordinary underdetermination within the domain of third-person physical predictions. Philosophers of science have long recognized that incompatible accounts of reality can produce identical empirical predictions. Where their predictions coincide, observations within that domain cannot discriminate between them. First-person evidence may bear on the metaphysical choice in ways a lunar mission cannot. Additional considerations may still guide judgment: coherence, parsimony, explanatory scope, compatibility with other knowledge. The shared engineering evidence does not make the choice for us.

The Bayesian point is equally direct. Evidence favors one hypothesis over another when the evidence is more expected under the first hypothesis than under the second. If physicalism and dual-aspect monism assign the same probability to a successful lunar mission, the mission leaves their relative probability where it found it. Whatever preference remains after Apollo must come from other evidence, prior commitments, or theoretical virtues such as parsimony and coherence.

Popular scientific culture behaves as though the likelihoods differ radically:

Physicalism predicts rockets. Metaphysics predicts prayer.

But dual-aspect monism predicts the rocket. It predicts the chemistry of combustion, the mechanics of orbital transfer, the behavior of alloys under heat, the operation of the guidance computer, and the radio signal returning through space. It changes none of the engineering because it disputes none of the physical description. Its disagreement begins when the physicalist calls that description exhaustive.

The success of a description within its domain cannot establish that no other aspect of the described reality exists. A map can guide you across a city without containing the smell of rain on the pavement. The omission does not make the map inaccurate. The usefulness of the map does not make the rain unreal.

The physical sciences describe the exterior structure of reality with astonishing precision. Their success licenses confidence in that description. The license reaches no further.

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Dual-aspect monism is routinely mistaken for the return of Cartesian dualism.

Someone hears that consciousness is fundamental and imagines a second substance entering the brain. Consciousness transmits from elsewhere. The brain receives it like an antenna. Damage the receiver and the signal degrades. Death breaks the connection and releases the mind back into whatever invisible medium supplied it.

That is Cartesian dualism fitted with radio equipment.

The brain and consciousness are the same thing. Your experience is what the process looks like from within. Your physical brain is what the same process looks like from without. Qualia, memory, integration, and the felt continuity of the present belong to the interior description. Neurons, electrical potentials, neurotransmitters, and large-scale network dynamics belong to the exterior description. Neither description causes the other. Neither description arrives from somewhere else. They are two aspects of one event.

This is what monism means. There is one substance. Dual-aspect theories hold that the mental and material are different aspects of a unitary reality. In Harald Atmanspacher’s more technical formulation, mind and matter are inseparable and irreducible manifestations of an underlying domain. The aspects remain equally fundamental, rather than reducing to a third neutral substance. Descartes posited two substances and inherited the problem of explaining how they interact. Spinoza posited one substance available under different attributes. With one substance, the interaction problem never arises.

God and atoms, in the Spinozan vocabulary, are made of the same thing. The sentence sounds mystical only because three centuries of scientific culture have trained us to hear God as the name of a supernatural person interfering with matter. Spinoza meant substance itself: the one reality of which thought and extension are attributes. One can discard the word God and retain the ontology. Nothing essential depends upon organized religion, providence, miracles, scripture, a personal creator, or a life after death.

On the version of this view I hold, a hydrogen atom possesses an experiential aspect. It is conscious in the thinnest possible sense and lacks everything that ordinarily causes us to use the word. It has no self-model, thought, memory, language, sight, hearing, narrative identity, or reflective awareness. Human consciousness is built through biological organization of almost inconceivable complexity. Evolution constructed cognitive technology capable of memory, attention, perception, abstraction, and a unified model of a self persisting through time.

This raises the combination problem immediately: how do tiny atomic experiences combine into the unified experience of a person? On my account, no such combination occurs. The question assumes billions of microscopic subjects whose private theaters must somehow merge. My account posits one substrate with an experiential aspect, indexed into perspectives by organized embodied systems. The hydrogen atom has an inside without containing a miniature self. A human being supports a unified perspective through the organization of the whole embodied being, rather than through the fusion of atomic minds. The explanatory burden moves to indexation: which organizations support a perspective, how the boundaries of that perspective are constituted, and why biological integration yields the forms of unity we experience. That debt is real. It is also different from the combination problem faced by constitutive micropsychism.

The physical organization observed under a microscope is the exterior aspect of that technology. It is neither an antenna receiving a foreign signal nor a projection manufactured by a disembodied mind. The organization and the experience are the same organized reality encountered from opposite sides.

Complex cognition still emerges. Human self-awareness still depends upon brains. Anesthesia, injury, development, disease, and death retain all their physical significance. Chemistry remains chemistry. Neuroscience remains neuroscience. The direction of the metaphysical explanation changes at one point: complex experience is organized from a reality that possessed an interior aspect all along.

The account therefore remains incomplete. A serious metaphysics creates research questions and receives no immunity from them.

It does dissolve the impossible demand at the center of reductive physicalism: derive the existence of experience from a description containing only quantities, relations, and behavior. Reductive physicalism begins with the exterior and promises that sufficient exterior complexity will produce an interior. The promise has no bridge. Non-reductive physicalists instead say mental facts supervene on physical facts and are nothing over and above them. Supervenience names the dependency while leaving its existence unexplained.

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Occam’s razor is often invoked here, as though physicalism proposes matter while dual-aspect monism proposes matter plus a ghost.

Dual-aspect monism proposes one substance. Physicalism also proposes one substance, then assigns that substance a peculiar limitation: its intrinsic nature contains nothing experiential, yet under certain organizational conditions experience appears. The stronger physicalist objection asks why we should attribute an interior aspect to a hydrogen atom when nothing in its behavior requires one. The answer begins with the same restraint: behavior never reveals an interior directly, including in other human beings. We infer other interiors because experience is the one case in which we know that exterior physical organization has an interior at all. Dual-aspect monism extends that datum continuously through one substance. Physicalism posits a point at which interiority appears inside a reality whose intrinsic nature had excluded it.

Parsimony concerns explanatory commitments. Cultural familiarity does not make a theory simple.

Physicalism carries the hard problem of consciousness, the binding problem, the relation between first-person facts and third-person descriptions, and the persistent inability to identify why any physical processing should feel like anything from within. These problems are sometimes treated as promissory notes. Neuroscience will eventually find the mechanism. Complexity will cross the explanatory gap. Integration will become experience if the equations describing integration become detailed enough.

The confidence comes from the historical prior. Science solved lightning, disease, heredity, planetary motion, and combustion. Consciousness will fall as those problems fell. The comparison assumes the conclusion. Those earlier problems concerned unknown structures and mechanisms within the exterior description. Consciousness is the existence of an interior description. More detail on one side of the distinction does not explain why the distinction exists.

The binding problem makes the failure visible. Distributed neural processes occur across different regions and timescales, yet experience arrives as a unified field. Neuroscience can study the correlations and coordination. It can identify which systems must function for integration to occur. The physical account still describes a collection of activities. The unity belongs to what those activities are like from within.

Occam’s razor cannot select physicalism by counting consciousness as an additional entity. Consciousness is the datum under explanation. Eliminating it from the premises and promising to recover it later has not made the ontology lean. It has concealed the unpaid debt.

⁂

Science remembers what happened when institutions claimed that revealed truth outranked observation. It remembers prohibited books, censored inquiry, forced recantations, and careers made contingent upon doctrinal obedience. The memory is held in the Galileo story even where the story has been simplified. Popularizers repeat it because they want the next Galileo protected.

The protection remains necessary. The inference attached to it can go.

There is another fact the inherited story handles too casually. Religious cognition appears with extraordinary ease. The phrase God gene gave this fact a vulgar genetic form: Dean Hamer proposed an association between spirituality and a variant of VMAT2. The association was never replicated, and even Hamer described spirituality as a complex trait shaped by many genes and a powerful environmental influence. As a review in Nature Genetics observed, the catchy name survived the science attached to it.

The underlying phenomenon survived too. Human beings across otherwise unrelated cultures repeatedly infer supernatural agency, purpose, moral order, and minds larger than their own. Children display teleological intuitions before they can defend a theology. Deborah Kelemen found that children tend to understand natural objects in terms of purpose and are unusually receptive to creator explanations, a pattern she called “intuitive theism”. The cognitive science of religion explains the cross-cultural recurrence and historical persistence of religious ideas through ordinary mental equipment: agency detection, theory of mind, teleological reasoning, memory biases, and the cultural transmission of minimally counterintuitive agents. On this account, religion comes naturally because the human mind is built to generate it.

That account may have the direction of explanation backward. Pattern recognition can explain the shapes religious intuition takes. Socialization can explain the names, stories, rituals, and prohibitions attached to it. Neither has established that the intuition itself is a cognitive error. If consciousness is fundamental, and individual minds are local organizations within a larger conscious reality, the persistent human sense of inhabiting a mind greater than our own may be a low-resolution awareness of an actual relation. Culture would then interpret the awareness rather than manufacture it.

The proposal remains metaphysical. Its rival is metaphysical too. Calling religious intuition an evolutionary byproduct redescribes the disposition in physicalist language and treats the redescription as a causal explanation. A brain organized to perceive a conscious ground of being would also possess neural machinery correlated with that perception. Finding the machinery would no more disprove the object than finding the visual cortex disproves light.

Christianity preceded imperial patronage and survived attempts to suppress it. Constantine legalized it, funded it, and convened councils that shaped doctrine for centuries. Whatever mixture of conviction and political calculation moved him, imperial power began domesticating an existing structure of belief around the needs of rule.

Marx understood religion with more sympathy than the phrase usually extracted from him suggests. He called it “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions” before calling it the opium of the people. Religion expressed real suffering and protested against it even as it consoled people inside the conditions producing their pain. Marx wanted the illusion abolished along with the conditions that required it. Institutions could use consolation to preserve power without having invented the hunger it answered.

Russia supplies the whole sequence in compressed form. Orthodoxy long preceded the czars, who inherited it and bent it toward the state. Peter the Great abolished the Moscow patriarchate in 1721 and turned the church’s central administration into a department of state. The Bolsheviks attacked the institution, confiscated its property, imprisoned and killed clergy, and tried to extirpate religious life. Stalin partially revived the church during the Second World War when its patriotic authority became useful. Putin later built a new compact from the surviving institution, state patronage, Russian nationalism, and the promise of civilizational legitimacy.

The compact has now reached its obscene conclusion. Patriarch Kirill placed the authority of the church behind the invasion of Ukraine and identified its future with the survival of Putin’s imperial project. By 2023, Carnegie’s account of the alliance described Kirill as unable to imagine the church outside the borders of the fallen empire. The Kremlin gains sacred language for state violence. The hierarchy gains protection, property, prestige, and a ruler willing to enforce its conception of Russia.

The state finds the religious impulse already present and captures the institution built around it. From Constantine’s councils to Putin’s compact with Kirill, political power repeatedly domesticated belief it could neither originate nor extinguish. The history explains political religion without reducing religious consciousness to political manipulation.

The Galileo story becomes especially silly when it treats the Church’s cruelty as evidence about God. If God exists as the conscious ground of reality, the persecution records what frightened men did while claiming divine authority. It records no divine approval. God, if asked, would likely have objected to the cell. A world containing free agents also contains priests who abuse freedom, institutions that confuse their interests with heaven’s, and rulers who discover that God’s name is useful precisely because God does not issue corrections through the state.

The danger lies in the alliance of certainty and authority. A religious institution can form that alliance. A scientific institution can form it too, though its methods contain stronger resources for correction. The comparison should not be flattened into an equivalence. No contemporary physics department possesses an Inquisition. A metaphysical prior can still become a boundary around respectable thought, determining which questions receive funding, which interpretations sound serious, and which anomalies are treated as invitations to rebuild rather than embarrassments to be absorbed.

The irony is severe. Scientific culture organized itself around opposition to a church that placed metaphysical commitments beyond revision. It then inherited a metaphysical commitment whose authority came from the story of that opposition.

The priest said the revealed account must be true because the institution carrying revelation had survived. The physicalist says the exterior account must be complete because the methods studying the exterior put footprints on the Moon.

The arguments differ in every historical and moral respect. They share one logical defect. Institutional victory has been mistaken for ontological proof.

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The Copernican revolution displaced the Earth. It left the ontology of observers untouched.

Copernicus displaced the Earth from the center of the planetary system. The result became a heuristic: when a theory assigns humanity a privileged spatial position, demand evidence. The heuristic served science well. Over time, spatial non-privilege expanded into ontological non-privilege. Humanity was not at the center; therefore life was not special. Life was not special; therefore consciousness was not fundamental. Consciousness was not fundamental; therefore the complete description of reality must contain no essential reference to observers.

I have called this expansion Copernican nihilism. It takes a correct result about location and turns it into a prior against interiority. The move from we are not spatially central to experience is ontologically derivative contains no valid inference. The historical sequence disguises the gap.

Physics itself has spent the last century making the observer harder to remove. Relativity indexes measurements to frames. Quantum mechanics indexes outcomes to measurement contexts. Cosmology confronts the fact that every description of the universe is produced from inside the universe by observers with finite horizons. The outside view remains indispensable, but it has never been a view from nowhere. It is a disciplined construction produced by beings who possess interiors.

In my earlier work on the Copernican principle, I argued that a productive scientific heuristic had become a protective metaphysical belt. The same pattern appears here. Evidence that humans occupy no privileged location is repeatedly presented as evidence that the universe has no inside. A statement about where we are becomes a statement about what we are.

Dual-aspect monism accepts every empirical humiliation Copernicus delivered. The Earth is not the center. The Sun is not the center. Human beings arrived late in cosmic history through evolution. Our senses disclose a narrow band of reality. Our intuitions fail outside the scales that formed them.

Humility about our position cannot require denial of the faculty performing the humbling.

Science works because conscious beings built institutions capable of correcting conscious beings. Instruments extend perception. Mathematics extends inference. Replication checks memory and desire. Peer criticism exposes individual thought to other interiors capable of finding its errors. The entire enterprise depends upon observers disciplined into a community, then tells itself that observers are absent from the final account.

That is the prior inherited from Galileo’s cell. It protected science from the priest. It has outlived the argument that justified it.

We should keep the protection. We should release the prior.

The equations will keep working, and no deity could intervene from outside nature because this view admits no outside substance from which to intervene. Science loses nothing by distinguishing the authority of its method from the completeness of its metaphysics.

Dual-aspect monism remains a metaphysical proposal. Apollo and the history attached to it were never capable of deciding among ontologies.

A man walked on the Moon because the exterior description of matter was good enough to carry him there.

He looked back at Earth from inside an experience the description still cannot contain.

Go Deeper into the Circus

Patrick Carroll has written a response to my essay “Libertarianism is Dead”. It is a useful response. He has stripped the disagreement of every rhetorical courtesy that might obscure it and stated the Rothbardian position with admirable candor.

Libertarians, he says, do not necessarily oppose coercion, domination, hierarchy, or the end of democratic self-government. Those words have nonlibertarian meanings, and the resulting disputes bore him. He proposes that libertarians abandon the vocabulary of liberty altogether and say what they mean:

“I’d rather just say that, as a general rule, it is moral to respect property rights as libertarians understand them, and it is immoral to violate property rights as libertarians understand them.”

The phrase appears in Carroll’s essay “Does Libertarianism Reduce to Feudalism?”, and it contains the entire argument. Property rights are moral because libertarians understand them as moral. Exchanges are voluntary when property rights, as libertarians understand them, have not been violated. Hierarchies are acceptable when they arise from property rights, as libertarians understand them. The word legitimate enters whenever the conclusion requires it, carrying inside itself the theory that was supposed to establish legitimacy.

Carroll regards this as an escape from semantics. It is the captivity of his argument by semantics. The libertarian definition has swallowed the moral world and announced that everything outside it is a word game.

I know this world. I have read Mises, Rothbard, Nozick, Hoppe, and the long tail of arguments generated by their disagreements. I once took those arguments seriously enough to spend an embarrassing number of words identifying the point at which Misesian praxeology gets extended into a metaphysics of self-ownership it cannot support. I did not leave libertarianism because I failed to understand where the theory leads. I left because I understood it.

Carroll’s response gives me no reason to return.

⁂

We should begin with the claim I actually made.

I did not write that libertarians are feudalists. I argued that a political order built from absolute property rights, voluntary contract, and a state limited to defense and contract enforcement will tend toward feudalistic arrangements. The distinction matters. One is an accusation about personal identity. The other is an argument about institutional consequences.

Carroll answers the first claim, which I did not make, by consulting Merriam-Webster. Historical feudalism, he observes, involved conquest, lords, vassals, military service, and land held in fee. Rothbard himself used feudalism to describe land seized through conquest and rented back to the people who worked it. Since libertarian property must be legitimate by definition, and feudal property arose through aggression, libertarianism cannot produce feudalism.

This is a genealogical answer to a structural argument.

The question is not whether a libertarian society would reproduce every institution of ninth-century Europe. It plainly would not. The question is whether its premises divide political sovereignty into privately controlled domains, make access to those domains conditional upon service or payment, attach practical rights to contractual status, and leave people without property dependent upon the terms offered by those who possess it. A modern arrangement can be feudalistic without containing knights, heraldry, or the precise land law of the Carolingian Empire.

This is not an idiosyncratic definition invented for a Substack argument. In 2001, the Rawlsian philosopher Samuel Freeman made the same structural case in “Illiberal Libertarians: Why Libertarianism Is Not a Liberal View”, published in Philosophy & Public Affairs. Freeman defined feudalism as a doctrine of political power, distinct from the manorial economy and the institution of serfdom. Its defining feature was a network of private contracts through which individuals personally acquire the authority to make and enforce political rules. “Those who exercise political power do so on behalf of others pursuant to their private contracts,” he wrote, and because the contracts differ, “there is no notion of a uniform body of law to be impartially applied to all individuals.” He pointed to feudal Japan to make the distinction explicit: feudal political relations do not require European serfdom. Libertarianism resembles feudalism because it converts political authority into a privately held contractual power. Carroll’s dictionary answers the costume. Freeman identified the structure.

Carroll eventually identifies the structure himself. He writes that I appear to use feudalism for a situation in which “someone can exercise absolute sovereignty over a piece of land and the people on it.” He acknowledges that libertarians endorse “a form of absolute sovereignty.” His objection is that libertarian sovereignty rests upon legitimate property rights.

That adjective performs all the work.

If the lord’s title is legitimate under libertarian rules, his dominion ceases to count as feudal. If every person living within the domain arrived through a valid chain of contracts, their subordination ceases to count as domination. If exit remains formally available, dependence ceases to count as coercive. The social relation has survived intact. The approved provenance of the title is supposed to transform its moral character.

This is why his response never reaches my argument. I am describing what power becomes when ownership carries the authority to govern. Carroll is inspecting the paperwork.

I ran this thought experiment publicly in December 2022, during an appearance on What Bitcoin Did called “The Reformed Libertarian”. I asked Peter McCormack to imagine a purely voluntarist society built from the ground up according to anarcho-capitalist rules. The purpose was to grant the theory its preferred initial conditions and see whether those conditions could survive their own consequences.

A man named Bob buys a thousand-square-mile island. The title is immaculate. The island was properly homesteaded, every transfer in the chain was voluntary, and no conquest or theft stains the acquisition. Bob divides the island into parcels, builds roads, attracts businesses, and offers long leases to people who agree by contract to follow his rules. Hundreds of thousands arrive. Skyscrapers rise. Bob’s Island becomes a business paradise. Bob is, as I put it then, “the CEO of the island.”

Years pass. Bob dies and leaves the island to his son, Peter. Peter is unstable. He quarrels with business leaders and governs the island with increasing cruelty. One day a seven-year-old child trespasses and breaks a window. Peter orders the family to remove the child from the island. They have nowhere to go. Peter gives them two hours to leave his property and threatens to throw the child into the ocean if they refuse.

Nothing in the sequence violates anarcho-capitalist principle. Bob acquired legitimate title. Every resident entered voluntarily. The leases disclosed his authority. Peter inherited the property through a valid transfer. The child trespassed. Once the family refuses to leave, the nonaggression principle identifies them as the aggressors and authorizes Peter to use force in defense of his property.

The question I asked McCormack was simple: “How is that not a state?” He agreed that it was “a state of sorts.” Yet no state had been declared and no libertarian rule had been broken. Contractualism, voluntarism, inheritance, and the nonaggression principle had generated a territorial sovereign with the recognized right to use violence against a resident child.

I have put versions of this thought experiment directly to serious libertarian thinkers for more than two decades, face-to-face. Jan Narveson, when I put it to him, did not dispute the structure: libertarianism had no clean moral response to the degenerate hypothetical. His comfort rested on the belief that a genuinely libertarian world would make the outcome highly improbable. This has always been the answer. Competition among jurisdictions would discipline Bob. Residents would leave before Peter’s rule became intolerable. A proprietor who threw children into the ocean would suffer reputational damage and lose customers.

This is a prediction about incentives offered in place of a moral argument. It concedes that the ethic permits the outcome. Libertarian voluntarism has no principle with which to condemn Peter once the title and contracts are clean. It can only reassure us that someone in Peter’s position probably will not use the authority the theory gives him.

An account of political legitimacy cannot rest on the permanent good sense of proprietors. The question political philosophy must answer is what may be done when the unlikely man arrives, inherits the island, commands the security force, and possesses a theory telling him that his violence is defensive. Liberal constitutionalism was built around this question. Libertarianism answers with a market forecast.

I have always found these responses suspicious. “Unlikely” is what a theory says when it has lost the argument about permissibility and wants probability to do the work of principle.

McCormack then asked how I would have defended the arrangement when I was still a libertarian. I answered that I would probably have made a special-pleading argument about competition among jurisdictions. People could always leave. Market incentives would prevent proprietors from behaving this way. Age and experience made that answer impossible to sustain. Human beings act against their interests, power attracts the malevolent, and the cost of exit rises with every home, livelihood, relationship, and institution built inside a place. Market forces cannot be trusted to prevent political domination after the market has assigned political authority to an owner.

Carroll’s response arrives almost four years later and vindicates the thought experiment. He does not deny Peter’s authority. He gives us the rule by which it becomes legitimate: respect “property rights as libertarians understand them.” The clean title settles the matter. The contractual history converts the island’s population into voluntary subjects. The violence at the end remains defensive because the proprietor’s victim has become a trespasser.

Nozick could never entirely escape the initial-conditions problem. His entitlement theory made the justice of a present holding depend upon its history: just acquisition, just transfer, or the rectification of prior injustice. The chain of title was therefore doing nearly all the moral work. Once the history contains conquest, theft, slavery, enclosure, fraudulent transfer, or grants from states that never possessed legitimate title themselves, the theory needs a principle of rectification capable of telling us which present holdings are legitimate. Nozick acknowledged the need and never produced a complete theory of it.

This was more than a missing technical appendix. If the justice of every subsequent exchange depends upon the justice of the starting distribution, and the starting distribution cannot be established, the theory cannot tell us whether the market outcome it defends is an exercise of liberty or the continuation of theft. “Voluntary exchange” inherits the moral uncertainty of the title being exchanged. The pristine initial condition performs the same service here that the permanent good sense of proprietors performs in the island argument: it assumes away the circumstance under which the theory would have to prove its worth.

Nozick later put explicit distance between himself and the hard libertarianism of Anarchy, State, and Utopia. In The Examined Life, he wrote that “the libertarian position I once propounded now seems to me seriously inadequate”, in part because it had failed to knit humane considerations and joint cooperative activity into its fabric and had neglected the symbolic importance of a political community expressing public concern. His stated reasons were broader than the initial-conditions problem, and it would be dishonest to conscript him into saying otherwise. The retreat matters because it records a serious thinker discovering that a political philosophy assembled from private entitlement and side constraints had left too much of political morality outside the frame.

He later qualified the qualification. In his final interview, Nozick said that he was “no longer as hardcore a libertarian” as he had once been and that reports of his apostasy had been exaggerated. Fair enough. But this does not restore the certainty of Anarchy, State, and Utopia. It leaves us with its author acknowledging that the clean system did not survive contact with the moral world.

Property rights cannot do the work Carroll assigns them until a political order has answered the questions hidden inside the word property.

What may be owned? How does an unowned thing first become property? What counts as abandonment? Which uses constitute nuisance? How far below a parcel does ownership extend, and how far above it? Who owns a river, a watershed, a migratory resource, the atmosphere, a coastline, a genome, an algorithm, or the information produced by millions of people acting together? What makes a contract unconscionable? What constitutes fraud when one party controls the information required to recognize it? What happens when performance becomes impossible? Which liabilities follow an asset after transfer? What does a person inherit along with title, and what debts can bind people who never consented to them?

Contract enforcement cannot begin until these questions have answers. Defense cannot know what it is defending until some institution has drawn the boundaries. Property is a legal relation among people concerning things. It does not announce its own content.

Rothbard understood at least part of this difficulty. His theory of title required original appropriation, voluntary transfer, and rectification where property had been stolen. The real world presents no clean ledger. Land has been conquered, enclosed, granted by states, taken from Indigenous peoples, accumulated through slavery, passed through corporations, reorganized through bankruptcy, and inherited across generations. Rothbard’s discussion of disputed titles permits expropriation where identifiable victims or heirs can establish a superior claim, and in some cases recognizes current possessors as owners when no legitimate claimant can be found.

The theory therefore requires an authority capable of reconstructing title across centuries, judging evidence, identifying heirs, determining when claims have lapsed, and enforcing the resulting transfers. The night-watchman has acquired an archive, a judiciary, a theory of evidence, a law of succession, and armed officers. He has become a government while continuing to insist that he merely protects what was already there.

Privatize those functions and the problem changes form. Competing protection agencies must decide which claims they recognize and what procedures they accept. Conflict among them ends through agreement, cartelization, territorial division, or violence. A successful agency gains the power to prohibit rival enforcement methods it considers unreliable. Nozick’s famous route from private protection to the minimal state proceeds through the emergence of exactly such a dominant protective association, one that acquires a de facto monopoly and must compensate independents whose enforcement it forbids.

The destination is government because the function is government. Calling its officers contractors does not alter the function. Calling its territory property does not disperse its sovereignty.

Where multiple territorial authorities remain, the result resembles a map of private jurisdictions. Your rights depend upon the rules of the domain you enter and the contract under which you enter it. The proprietor supplies law, security, adjudication, and the conditions of residence. The resident possesses exit, assuming another proprietor will admit him and assuming he can bear the cost of leaving.

That arrangement has many possible names. Feudalistic remains a good one.

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Carroll thinks the dispute can be resolved by assigning every contested word a libertarian and nonlibertarian definition.

Under the libertarian definition, Carroll writes, “work or starve” is voluntary. Private actors rarely violate property rights, so private power does not usually trouble the theory. A hierarchy created without a property-rights violation is acceptable. Government regulation can promote what I call freedom while reducing what he calls freedom. Once we admit that the vocabularies differ, we can stop accusing one another of inconsistency.

This sounds clear because the circularity has been made explicit.

Voluntary action is action consistent with libertarian property rights. Libertarian property rights are justified because respecting them is moral. Their moral status comes from an account of self-ownership, and self-ownership is described as the only coherent way to recognize human agency. Each definition supplies the premise needed by the next. By the time the circle closes, the conclusion appears inescapable.

Misesian praxeology cannot establish the missing moral premise. Praxeology begins from the claim that human beings act: they employ means in pursuit of chosen ends. Mises treated the discipline as value-free. It can explain that a person acts, what constraints action encounters, and how means relate to ends. It cannot derive a moral title from the fact of agency. In “Praxeology, Value Judgments, and Public Policy”, Rothbard himself distinguished the value-free character of economic analysis from the ethical judgments required for public policy.

The fact that I control my body in action does not establish that my relationship to my body is ownership. Control is a fact. Ownership is a normative institution. A prisoner controls his hand when he lifts it. A child controls her voice when she speaks. Neither fact tells us the full set of rights, duties, and claims that ought to govern what follows.

Rothbard’s self-ownership argument moves too quickly from agency to property. Someone must control each body, the argument runs. Control must therefore belong to the person, to another person, or to the collective. Ownership by others produces slavery. Collective ownership is impracticable because everyone would need permission from everyone else before acting. Individual self-ownership remains.

The trilemma works only after every morally relevant relationship to a person has been translated into ownership. That translation is the disputed step. Bodily autonomy can rest upon personhood, dignity, agency, or a prohibition against treating persons as objects. None requires us to imagine the self as both proprietor and property. The grammar of ownership is imposed before the alternatives are counted.

Even a successful argument for bodily self-ownership would not establish absolute rights over the external world. My authority over my body does not tell me how much unowned land I may appropriate, whether labor creates perpetual title, what obligations attach to resources others need to live, or why descendants should inherit the full political consequences of an ancestor’s acquisition. The bridge from agency to an entire property regime is built from moral premises praxeology never supplied.

Carroll calls the resulting regime property rights as libertarians understand them. That is honest. It is also fatal to his claim that definitions have ended the argument. The definition is the argument.

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There is a strange parallel here with the Marxist social theory libertarians regard as their opposite.

Marxism and Rothbardian libertarianism begin from opposing moral commitments. They resemble one another in method. Each selects a master relation and uses it to decode the rest of social life. For the Marxist, ownership of the means of production organizes class domination and turns liberal rights into superstructure. For the Rothbardian, legitimate title organizes moral reality and turns public claims into disguised aggression.

Both systems promise to reveal the coercion hidden by ordinary political language. Both distrust the mixed institutions through which actual societies negotiate competing goods. Both imagine that once the foundational relation has been purified, social order can emerge without the compromises that politics exists to manage.

Their defenses against counterexample also rhyme. The Marxist can explain the failures of a revolutionary state as residues of capitalism, foreign sabotage, or deviations from the true theory. The libertarian can explain concentrated private power as the residue of state privilege, stolen title, regulatory capture, or a market not yet made free. Every ugly outcome belongs to the contaminated transition. The purified system waits beyond history, innocent of the arrangements produced in its name.

This does not make libertarianism Marxist. It exposes a shared metaphysical temptation: the belief that one relation can make the human world morally legible from top to bottom. Class performs the work in one system. Property title performs it in the other.

Actual freedom is institutionally plural. It depends upon property and contract, because people need stable control over resources and reliable expectations. It also depends upon public goods, common resources, civic status, labor power, family obligations, democratic voice, and protections that cannot be reduced to title. A society must decide how these goods coexist. The decision cannot be avoided by defining one of them as the source of all the others.

Libertarianism calls that decision aggression. Marxism calls it class rule. Politics returns anyway.

⁂

Carroll is especially amused by my sentence that freedom requires constraint. He asks whether I am doing an Orwell impression.

The sentence is ordinary liberalism.

Every right constrains someone. My property right limits what you may do with an object. My right to speak limits what a public official may do to silence me. My bodily autonomy limits what everyone else may do to my body. A contract creates constraints that did not exist before the agreement. The question has always been which constraints make reciprocal freedom possible, which protect domination, and which institutions can distinguish between them.

Property is among the most extensive systems of constraint human beings have devised. An owner may exclude the rest of the world from a resource. The libertarian does not object to the constraint because he believes it justified. Fine. The dispute concerns the justification and the institutional consequences. Renaming justified constraints freedom while reserving constraint for everything else supplies no answer.

Democratic government can dominate. Majorities can persecute minorities. Agencies can become arbitrary, police can become predatory, and law can become an instrument of private interests. Liberal constitutionalism exists because public power is dangerous.

It also recognizes a distinction Carroll’s theory erases. A citizen stands inside the institution that governs him with rights of voice, contestation, due process, and equal status that do not depend upon a proprietor’s permission. A tenant or employee stands inside a private order on terms ultimately set by the owner. Albert O. Hirschman’s distinction between exit and voice names the choice. Exit may discipline that owner when alternatives are plentiful and the costs of movement are low. Voice becomes indispensable when work, housing, healthcare, family, and community make exit expensive.

Democracy does not make public power pure. It makes power answerable in a way private sovereignty is not. Constitutional rights place some questions beyond ordinary majorities. Elections permit peaceful removal. Courts require reasons. Public law applies through a status of citizenship shared by people who own unequal amounts of property.

The alternative Carroll defends makes the right to govern an incident of ownership. Hoppe’s covenant communities carry the premise to its conclusion: proprietors may construct communities around restrictive covenants and exclude people whose presence or conduct violates the owners’ terms. “Yes, we absolutely embrace the right to exclude being absolute,” Carroll writes, while insisting that defending the right differs from endorsing each exclusion.

For the excluded person, the distinction offers little shelter. His practical liberty depends upon finding an owner willing to tolerate him.

This was the point of my reference to a fascist tendency. I did not claim that libertarianism and fascism are identical doctrines. Fascism worships the state; anarcho-capitalism formally abolishes it. The tendency appears where each produces domains of unanswerable authority, normalizes expulsion as an instrument of social order, and makes the standing of disfavored people depend upon the permission of rulers they cannot meaningfully contest. The routes differ. Some of the relations at the destination look familiar.

I made this distinction explicitly more than two years ago in “The Libertarian-to-Fascist Pipeline”. I wrote at the outset that I was “not saying that if you are a libertarian that you are fascist, or that you are on your way to becoming a fascist.” The essay treated libertarianism and fascism as tendencies, then asked how the first can collapse into the second. Its answer was the common good. Once every countervailing public claim is dismissed as aggression, the economically dominant acquire the practical power to project their moral preferences through ownership. The philosophy that began with the desire to escape control arrives at a system in which owners may control everyone who needs access to what they own.

The pipeline runs through exclusion. As I wrote then, the project eventually asks a governing question: “who can I exclude?” Hoppe’s covenant community supplies the answer through private title. Carroll’s response supplies the justification. He accepts that the right to exclude is absolute, accepts the hierarchies that follow from it, and rejects democratic claims against them as violations of the property regime. No conversion to a state-worshipping doctrine is required. The owner already possesses the authority that matters inside his domain.

Carroll responds that they cannot be fascist because fascism is statist. Once again, the dictionary guards the gate while power walks around it.

⁂

Carroll does make one important correction to my original essay.

I asked libertarians whether they wanted their philosophy to provide cover for people working to end democratic self-government and build a new aristocracy. I suggested they might return to classical liberalism because it better fulfills values they already hold.

Carroll answers: “We chose libertarianism over classical liberalism because we knew and liked the fact that it is ‘working to end democratic self-governance’ and so on.” Later, speaking of committed libertarians who had followed the philosophy to its conclusion, he writes that “we saw where this philosophy goes when you take it all the way and we loved the idea.”

I accept the correction. My appeal was addressed to libertarians who still believe their highest commitment is human liberty, who regard dispersed power as a good, and who imagine democracy as one of the institutions that protects them from rule by other people. Carroll speaks for those whose highest commitment is the Rothbardian property regime itself. They do not share the values to which I appealed.

This narrows the audience. It strengthens the indictment.

The original essay argued that libertarian rhetoric was being weaponized by people building post-democratic systems of private power. Carroll’s answer is that some libertarians understand this perfectly and approve. I documented the broader intellectual genealogy in “The Plot Against America”, tracing the movement from libertarian hostility toward the state through neoreaction and into the Silicon Valley project to replace democratic government with proprietary systems. In “The Sovereign Individual Was the Blueprint”, I followed the more specific path from the language of exit and competitive governance to a political project aimed at making democratic sovereignty obsolete. Carroll declines the cover story. He wants the exit.

The disagreement is now clean.

I believe liberty belongs to persons before it belongs to property. Property rights are among the institutions that protect liberty, and their legitimacy depends upon the human goods they serve. Carroll believes the libertarian property regime supplies the moral standard by which liberty, coercion, domination, and hierarchy must be understood. Where democratic self-government violates that regime, democracy is wrong.

He is entitled to hold that position. He is not entitled to declare the argument over because the libertarian dictionary agrees with him.

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“Call it what you want,” Carroll writes.

Very well.

Call it a society in which ownership carries sovereignty. Call it a legal order in which the people who possess territory determine the rules for those who need access to it. Call it a system where protection, adjudication, residence, and practical liberty depend upon contract with private authorities. Call it an arrangement where exit replaces voice and where people without property move among jurisdictions built by people who have it.

I call that feudalistic because the word identifies the political relation that matters: private dominion joined to material dependence.

Carroll calls it liberty because every title is legitimate under rules supplied by the theory that declares the titles legitimate.

His response does not demolish my argument. It demonstrates the mechanism I was describing. The philosophy encounters domination and asks whether the paperwork is in order. It encounters hierarchy and asks whether the hierarchy arose by contract. It encounters private government and asks whether the governors own the land. When each answer satisfies the libertarian definition, the moral inquiry ends.

That is the fatal conceit of the argument. Human freedom has been compressed into a theory of title, and the theory mistakes the tidiness of its definitions for the justice of the world they would produce.

Libertarianism remains alive as an identity, a subculture, and an intellectual tradition. Carroll is right about that. As a theory capable of delivering the liberty it advertises, it has reached the end of the road.

At the end stands a gate.

Someone owns it.

Go Deeper into the Circus

I have come to believe that the United States needs a conservative movement.

The truth is that I am not a progressive. It is not in my personality to agitate for change. My first instinct is to ask what a change will cost, what it might disturb, and whether the people proposing it understand the thing they intend to alter. I feel the weight of continuity. I am suspicious of anyone who treats a society as raw material.

I do not look down on people who agitate for radical change. They are often the first to see injuries that a stable order has taught everyone else to regard as ordinary. I have come to agree with much of the progressive left’s and the social democratic critique of our political economy, especially its account of the moral emergency created by wealth inequality. A society in which millions live one illness or missed paycheck from disaster while a small class accumulates fortunes beyond any conceivable private use is disordered. The order I am inclined to preserve is already failing to preserve the lives within it.

This will still surprise some readers. I support higher taxes on wealth, a larger social state, labor power, aggressive antitrust enforcement, constitutional amendment, and the reconstruction of institutions that American conservatives have spent half a century trying to weaken. I support a general amnesty for nonviolent immigrants, followed by legal status and an eventual path to citizenship. I want a federal government capable of governing. I want the people who attempted to overturn the last constitutional order prosecuted, the people who financed them exposed, and the doctrines that made their attempt possible removed from American law.

If I listed every policy preference I currently hold and handed the list to the people who classify political identities for a living, most would place me somewhere on the progressive left. They would have a reasonable basis for doing so. Yet the classification would miss something fundamental about how I arrive at those positions, what I fear, and what I am trying to preserve.

It would also exaggerate how far these preferences sit from the American public. The exact margin changes with the wording and the income threshold, but the direction has been remarkably durable. In 2007, Gallup found that 66 percent of Americans believed upper-income people paid too little in federal taxes and 71 percent said the same of corporations (Gallup). In 2019, Pew found 58 percent support for raising taxes on household income above $250,000 and 68 percent support for raising taxes on large businesses and corporations (Pew Research Center). Gallup found in 2025 that 70 percent still believed corporations paid too little, a view it reported had changed little since the question was first asked in 2004 (Gallup). Pew’s 2025 survey found 63 percent support for higher corporate rates and 58 percent support for higher rates on household income above $400,000 (Pew Research Center). More narrowly targeted proposals can poll higher still: a 2019 survey found 70 percent support for increasing taxes on families earning more than $10 million a year (Fox News).

The political class nevertheless discusses these ideas as electoral contraband. On television panels and inside campaign strategy shops, higher taxes on wealth and corporate power are treated as concessions to an activist fringe, dangerous in a general election and safely ignored once a primary ends. This is something elites tell one another, repeat often enough to acquire the texture of practical wisdom, and rarely test against the electorate they invoke. The polling record says otherwise. The allegedly radical position has commanded majority support across pollsters, question wordings, and political eras, with some formulations drawing support even from Republican voters. The nonstarter keeps winning the argument that respectable politics refuses to have.

None of this sounds conservative in the vocabulary of American politics.

The vocabulary is broken.

Every democratic society needs a conversation between its appetite for change and its instinct for continuity. The first asks whether the existing order is just. The second asks what the effort to improve it might destroy. A healthy polity needs both questions asked in good faith, because societies can preserve injustice for generations and can also demolish, in a season of certainty, institutions they will spend generations trying to recover.

That conversation requires a liberal conservatism: liberal in its commitment to constitutional government, equal citizenship, pluralism, and the rule of law; conservative in its respect for inherited institutions, accumulated social knowledge, and the moral claims of people who must live through whatever transformation politics proposes.

The United States currently has no political movement adequate to that role.

The Republican Party calls itself conservative. It is a wretched coalition of oligarchs, reactionaries, nativists, authoritarians, religious revanchists, and Donald Trump. The factions disagree about the country they want. They agree that the constitutional order stands in their way.

The oligarchs want a state too weak to restrain private power and strong enough to protect it. The nativists want citizenship reorganized around blood, inheritance, and cultural submission. The reactionaries want to reverse social settlements they never accepted. The fascists want the will of the leader to outrank the law. Donald Trump wants whatever Donald Trump wants at the moment he wants it, and an entire political party has spent a decade converting those wants into a theory of executive power.

The tech right is unusually candid about the destination. Curtis Yarvin has argued for replacing democratic government with a sovereign executive modeled on a corporate chief. His state would be run as a company, its ruler accountable to something resembling a board rather than an electorate. Asked about the model, he has described the desired figure as a CEO or dictator. This vision now circulates among people with money, platforms, and access to power (CNN).

Calling this conservatism should embarrass anyone with an elementary understanding of the word. These people propose to abolish the constitutional arrangements under which the country has existed for more than two centuries. They regard the separation of powers as friction, an independent civil service as sabotage, judicial review as legitimate only when it serves them, elections as suspect when they lose, and the public as a problem to be managed. Their political project is revolutionary. Its aesthetic is restoration because reactionaries prefer to dress the future in costumes stolen from the past.

The CEO monarch is still a monarch. A purge is still a purge when the men conducting it call themselves efficiency experts. The liquidation of constitutional government does not become conservative because its beneficiaries own copies of Edmund Burke.

Conservatism begins with a fact about human beings: we inherit more than we understand.

No generation creates the country in which it lives. We arrive inside languages, laws, customs, institutions, obligations, memories, and forms of trust built by people whose names we will never know. Much of this inheritance is unjust. Some of it is absurd. All of it precedes our consent, yet without it we would possess no common world in which consent could matter.

Tradition is the memory of a society carried in practice. It tells people how to inhabit institutions whose formal rules never fully describe them. A Constitution can assign powers, but it cannot by itself produce restraint. A statute can create an office, but it cannot make its holder honest. Courts can announce rules, but they depend upon a public habit of accepting judgments one has the power to resist. The written order survives through unwritten disciplines.

Those disciplines are fragile. They can become excuses for exclusion and shields for corruption. They can also carry knowledge that reformers notice only after they have destroyed it. The conservative insight is that social practices deserve attention before demolition because their purposes may be distributed, tacit, and difficult to reconstruct.

This insight does not make tradition sovereign. An inheritance can be refused. The United States has had to refuse a great deal of its own: slavery, segregation, the political subordination of women, the criminalization of homosexuality, the casual impunity of capital. Every one of those refusals disturbed an established order. Every one was necessary.

A living tradition survives by learning. Edmund Burke’s familiar sentence remains useful: “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation” (Reflections on the Revolution in France). Change is how a political inheritance answers the moral knowledge acquired by the people living within it. A country that cannot change eventually forces reform to arrive as rupture.

That is the tension a democratic polity must maintain. Progressivism at its best forces the country to hear the people whom its arrangements injure. Conservatism at its best forces reform to account for complexity, continuity, and cost. Liberalism supplies the rules under which the argument can continue without either side acquiring the power to end it.

The parenthesis in this essay’s title matters. Conservatism detached from liberalism becomes hierarchy in search of a justification. Liberalism detached from any conservative instinct can begin to mistake the removal of limits for freedom. Liberal conservatism accepts change while insisting upon a world stable enough for human beings to make lives inside it.

⁂

I hold views that fit comfortably within that disposition.

The rate of social change matters. Human beings have finite capacities for adaptation. Institutions have finite capacities for absorption. A reform can be just in its object and destructive in its pace. Politics must care about the interval between announcing a new arrangement and making it livable.

Culture matters. A nation cannot sustain itself through procedure alone. People need stories, rituals, symbols, places, and memories that allow strangers to recognize one another as participants in a shared project. These things should remain open to reinterpretation because the nation belongs equally to citizens whose ancestors arrived yesterday and citizens whose ancestors arrived before its founding. Shared culture becomes stronger when more people can claim it without surrendering themselves.

Institutional legitimacy matters. The slow, frustrating procedures of constitutional government express a moral truth: other people exist, they disagree, and they cannot be wished away. Compromise is frequently ugly because pluralism is real. A government that moves at the speed of one man’s will has solved the problem of disagreement by abolishing the political standing of everyone else.

Order matters too. The law must be predictable, public, and equally applied. Violence cannot become an ordinary instrument of political competition. Contracts must mean something. Elections must settle who governs. Public officials must possess enough authority to act and face enough constraint to remain servants of the constitutional order.

These commitments place me in direct opposition to the movement that has monopolized the conservative label.

The modern Republican Party accelerates social change in the most destabilizing form available: it changes the regime itself. It converts public offices into instruments of personal rule, replaces professional administration with loyalty, treats legal constraint as an insult to electoral victory, and asks millions of Americans to reorganize their understanding of citizenship around obedience to a leader. The party that speaks most often of order has made organized lawlessness its method. The party that praises tradition has broken the republican tradition at its point of greatest vulnerability: the peaceful transfer and lawful exercise of power.

The unitary executive pipeline has spent decades preparing the legal architecture for this turn. Its achievement is a more powerful president presiding over a weaker presidency, with personal authority expanding as the institutional capacity and independence of the executive branch collapse. The gaslighting now directed at the country completes the project by attacking the public’s ability to name what it sees.

Nothing about this conserves the American republic.

⁂

The work of conservation has therefore moved elsewhere.

Conserving a constitutional democracy captured by wealth requires taxing wealth. Extreme concentrations of private power do not remain private. They purchase speech, access, law, media, expertise, and eventually the state itself. A republic in which a handful of men can acquire the infrastructure of public discourse and bargain with governments as peers has already permitted economic inequality to become constitutional inequality.

Progressive taxation is an act of democratic maintenance. It keeps fortunes from hardening into dynasties and markets from producing sovereigns. The point is not punishment. The point is preserving a political order in which citizenship carries more authority than ownership.

Antitrust belongs to the same work. A competitive market cannot survive if its winners acquire the power to close the market behind them. Concentrated corporate power weakens communities, disciplines workers, dictates terms to suppliers, and converts economic dominance into political command. Breaking that power apart preserves the market from monopoly and the republic from private government.

Conserving a nation of immigrants requires bringing millions of settled people inside the law. Men and women who have lived here for years, worked, raised children, paid taxes, and built communities should have a legal status that reflects the lives they actually lead. General amnesty for nonviolent immigrants, followed by a path to citizenship, would strengthen the civic order by allowing those lives to enter it fully. A permanent population compelled to live outside the law corrodes the law and invites exploitation. Citizenship is how a republic turns presence into membership and membership into obligation.

Conserving the rule of law requires prosecutions. A legal system that declines to punish attacks upon itself teaches future attackers that patience will be rewarded. Mercy can belong to justice only after accountability has established that the law exists. The American habit of “moving on” has become a mechanism by which powerful people transfer the cost of their reconciliation to the public.

Conserving the Constitution requires amendment. The present emergency has exposed defects that custom once concealed: emergency powers broad enough to swallow legislative government, a pardon power capable of rewarding crimes committed for a president, an executive branch vulnerable to conversion into personal machinery, and a constitutional enforcement system too dependent on the good faith of officials whose bad faith it was designed to constrain.

Repairing those defects does not betray the Constitution. Article V is part of the Constitution. Amendment is one of the means by which the constitutional order survives knowledge its authors could not possess. A country devoted to becoming more perfect must remain unfinished. Perfection would mean stasis, and political stasis maintained by power has another name.

The reforms required may be severe. Presidential power must be bound more clearly. Public corruption laws must reach the forms of corruption modern oligarchy actually practices. The civil service must be insulated from personal purges. Congress must recover powers it surrendered through cowardice and convenience. Voting rights must rest on firmer ground than the temporary composition of the Supreme Court. The constitutional order needs defenses designed by people who now understand how close it came to being lost.

Radical circumstances can make extensive reform the conservative course. The scale of a remedy should answer the scale of the damage. A surgeon preserving a life does not choose the smallest incision as an article of faith.

⁂

American politics has confused conservatism with the defense of whoever currently possesses power. That confusion serves the possessors very well. It allows oligarchs to call taxation radical while they redesign the state around their fortunes. It allows presidential absolutists to call constitutional constraint subversion. It allows men proposing monarchy to present themselves as guardians of an inheritance they intend to liquidate.

The inheritance is ours too.

The Constitution belongs to the people who want to amend it so it can survive. The rule of law belongs to the people willing to apply it to presidents and billionaires. The national tradition belongs to every citizen prepared to carry its best commitments forward and repair the injuries committed in its name. No faction acquires title to the past by shouting loudest about it.

I want a conservative movement capable of saying that something precious has been handed down to us, that we are responsible for understanding it, and that our freedom includes an obligation to deliver it alive to people we will never meet. Such a movement would know that conservation sometimes requires restraint and sometimes reconstruction. It would distinguish an institution’s age from its worth, continuity from inertia, and order from domination.

It would oppose the revolutionary right with the confidence of people defending their country from men who have mistaken possession for inheritance.

What must be conserved is the republic: the constitutional structure, the habits of pluralism, the shared culture, the equality of citizenship, and the possibility of peaceful correction. Anything that threatens those things deserves opposition, whatever costume it wears and whatever label it claims.

The country needs change because the country is in danger. The work ahead is constitutional, economic, cultural, and moral. Its purpose is conservation.

Go Deeper into the Circus

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina died on Saturday evening, two days after his seventy-first birthday. His office attributed his death to “a brief and sudden illness” and disclosed nothing further. NBC News reported that emergency personnel responded to a call for cardiac arrest at a residence belonging to Graham, citing police-scanner audio. The President’s tribute arrived on Truth Social within hours: “Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the greatest people and Senators I have ever known, is dead!” It ended: “DETAILS AND ARRANGEMENTS TO FOLLOW. So sad!”

The machinery of Washington obituary has already begun its work. In short order the cable segments will have been produced and the wire pieces filed and the “greatest defender of the American military” tributes assembled from B-roll of Graham on aircraft carriers, and by the funeral the composite portrait will be complete: the war hero’s best friend, the bipartisan dealmaker, the son of South Carolina, the happy warrior, the man who — whatever you thought of his politics — loved his country in his own way.

That piece will not come from me. The ritual by which American public life launders men like Lindsey Graham at their deaths is one of the ways American public life keeps producing men like Lindsey Graham, and I do not intend to participate in it. The truth about a public life does not become false the day the man dies. And the truth about this public life, held plainly and without the softening that death is thought to require, is that Lindsey Graham spent the last decade of his career doing specific, nameable damage to the country he claimed to love, and the country will be living with that damage long after the eulogies have faded.

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On June 21, three weeks before he died, Graham sat across from Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation after a four-and-a-half-hour meeting with the President. He granted diplomacy its fig leaf. “Let’s try a diplomatic solution,” he said. “I think it’s going to fail.” Then came the message dressed as a forecast: “I spent four-and-a-half hours with President Trump, Friday. Here’s what I think will happen next.” If the memorandum of understanding with Tehran collapsed, Graham predicted, “President Trump is going to take the Strait of Hormuz over by force. The United States will control the Strait of Hormuz. We’ll charge a fee for all those who go through to pay for the operation.” And then, in the sentence that will follow his name in the archives, he said what would happen if Iran resisted this seizure of its own maritime border: “If Iran contests control of the Strait of Hormuz by the United States, we will obliterate them.”

Obliterate. A nation of ninety million people, discussed on Sunday morning television in the register of a man previewing a real estate transaction. Graham’s forecast performed the courtier’s signature function. He emerged from the principal’s rooms to predict, with evident authority, what the principal would do, delivering the threat while preserving the deniability. His place in the ecology of this administration was to translate the President’s belligerence into a form that could pass through the Senate without requiring the Senate to think about what it was passing.

Three days later, on June 24, Graham posted on X calling for the Senate to re-vote the Iran War Powers Resolution and defeat it, on the ground that the earlier vote — which had asserted Congress’s constitutional authority to authorize the very war Graham had helped launch — was “emboldening” Iran during negotiations. He wrote: “If possible, we should re-vote.” The stated concern was tactical. The actual meaning was that the last legislative check on a war Graham had spent fifteen years lobbying for should be removed, retroactively, so that the executive branch could prosecute the war without interruption. This was a senior senator asking his colleagues to disable the Constitution’s principal restraint on presidential war-making for the convenience of the President he served. It was three weeks before he died.

This completed a fifteen-year arc.

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Graham had been calling for war with Iran since 2010. In March of that year he stood at an AIPAC dinner and told the audience that “sometimes it is better to go to war than to allow the Holocaust to develop a second time” — a rhetorical move so morally reckless in its analogy that the room, one imagines, cannot have entirely known what to do with it — and by November he was at a security forum in Halifax explaining that any American strike on Iran should aim not merely at the nuclear program but at “sinking their navy, destroying their air force, and delivering a decisive blow to the Revolutionary Guard.” “In other words,” he added, “neuter that regime.” Sixteen years later, three weeks before his death, he compared Western funding for Iran’s reconstruction to “a Marshall Plan with a Nazi still in charge for Germany.” The analogy had become a habit of mind, a mechanism for making every restraint sound like complicity in extermination. Graham was a senator on the Armed Services Committee, speaking as a person whose words had operational consequence.

For the next fifteen years he never stopped. He supported the Iraq surge in 2007 and opposed the withdrawal in 2011, warning that leaving Iraq would let it “go to hell.” He wanted twenty thousand American ground troops in Iraq and Syria in 2015 to fight the Islamic State. He wanted to bomb Iran in 2015 to prevent the nuclear deal, and he wanted to bomb Iran in 2018 after the deal was canceled, and he wanted to bomb Iran in 2020 after Soleimani. Within days of October 7, 2023, he called for Iran’s oil refineries to be destroyed if Hezbollah escalated the war. That November he introduced a bipartisan Senate resolution urging that all options, including military force, remain available if Iranian proxies widened the conflict or killed Americans.

The war we are now in is the war he wanted. The Fordow strike, the B-2 sortie, the memorandum of understanding, the sixty-day window, the threatened seizure of the Strait — all of it exists in the shape it exists in because Lindsey Graham, and the small caucus of hawks around him, spent fifteen years pushing every administration they served in and every administration they opposed toward this outcome. He got what he wanted, and the country is going to be paying for what he wanted for a generation. This is the plain factual account of what he did with the Senate seat he held for twenty-three years, and it is inseparable from the larger project of executive-power consolidation that has organized American conservative politics for the last decade.

On Friday, one day before he died, Graham returned from his tenth wartime visit to Kyiv after helping secure an agreement with the Trump administration to move new Russia-sanctions legislation forward. His support for Ukraine was real. It was probably the best sustained thing he did with his final years, and the gratitude expressed by Ukrainians was earned. A man can be right about one war and spend fifteen years manufacturing another. The tributes will use Ukraine to erase Iran, converting the courage he showed on one question into absolution for the recklessness he cultivated on another. An honest accounting keeps both truths on the page.

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The tribute writers face a harder problem in Graham’s own voice, which cannot be filed down without editing him away.

In July of 2015, when Donald Trump insulted John McCain by saying that being captured did not make a man a war hero, Graham — McCain’s closest friend in the Senate and, as of Saturday, the last survivor of what Graham, McCain, and Joe Lieberman had called the Three Amigos — went on television and called Trump “a jackass.” Then, on CBS the next morning, he called him “the world’s biggest jackass.” Then, in December of that year, after Trump proposed banning Muslims from entering the United States, Graham went on CNN and said, in one of the more direct sentences an American senator has delivered on camera: “You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell. He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for.”

He was right. That is the difficulty for his tributes. These were the settled judgments of a man speaking deliberately. He identified precisely what Donald Trump was, in public, on national television, in the sentences of a man who understood what he was seeing and understood the danger and had the words available to name it. He called Trump a demagogue. He called him unfit for office. He said, on the day Trump effectively secured the nomination in May of 2016, “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed, and we will deserve it.” He said conservatism as a movement would take generations to recover from Trump’s damage. He said, in the primary that year, that choosing between Trump and Cruz was like choosing between being shot and being poisoned. He said, of the possibility that he might be Trump’s running mate, that it would be “like buying a ticket on the Titanic.”

Then Trump won.

And Lindsey Graham became one of the most consistent, most public, most operationally consequential defenders of the man he had accurately described as a race-baiting demagogue unfit for command — the man whose administration is now conducting the systematic gaslighting of the country about what it is doing to the constitutional order. He played golf with him at Bedminster. He rode with him on Air Force One. He whispered in his ear about Iran and Syria and Ukraine, and he came out of those meetings to translate what he had heard into legislative pressure and cable-news framing that made the President’s belligerence appear ratified by seasoned senatorial judgment. When John McCain gave the thumbs-down that saved the Affordable Care Act in 2017, Graham stayed friends with McCain — that friendship was real, and I will not diminish it — but he did not extend the moral framework that had made McCain the man he was to the political fights ahead. When McCain died in 2018, and Trump refused for days to lower the White House flags to half-staff, and denigrated McCain’s memory at every opportunity for years afterward, Graham absorbed the insult to his friend’s memory, explained it away, and carried on.

By 2019 he was telling the country, on the record, that Donald Trump had never made “a single racist statement. Not even close.” By 2024 he was on stage at Trump rallies. On June 28, 2025, during Senate floor debate, he defended the strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities and said the War Powers Act was “not worth in my view the papers written on.” By 2026 he was in the Oval Office for four and a half hours at a stretch, coming out to tell the country that if Iran resisted the seizure of the Strait of Hormuz, “we will obliterate them.”

The tributes will describe this arc as a “shift” or an “evolution.” What actually happened was a conversion undertaken with full knowledge of what he was converting to. In his own voice, on the record, in sentences that will outlast every eulogy his colleagues will offer, he had told us exactly what Donald Trump was and exactly what supporting him would cost the party and the country. And then, when the choice presented itself between being right in exile and being wrong at the elbow of power, he chose. He chose knowingly. And what he chose is the ongoing degradation of American constitutional government, the humiliation of the Senate as an institution, the elevation of a man he himself had named as unfit, and, in the last three weeks of his life, the public delivery of a threat to wage war against a country of ninety million people in language his former friend McCain would not have recognized as the language of a serious statesman.

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The eulogists will say he was a patriot in his own way, that he served his country, that the Senate is diminished by his absence and we should remember him for his best moments and let the ambiguities go. This is the ritual, and I understand why it exists. It is the ritual by which political communities smooth over the frictions that would otherwise make continued cooperation impossible, and it is a ritual that has served American public life reasonably well in ordinary times, when the men and women it laundered were within some tolerable range of ordinary imperfection.

These are not ordinary times, and Lindsey Graham was not within that range.

He knew what Donald Trump was, said so in public with more precision than most of his colleagues managed, and then spent nine years making Donald Trump possible. In the last month of his life he was in the Oval Office building the war that will define the second Trump administration and probably the decade to follow, working alongside the men who returned the spoils system to the executive branch and dismantled the machinery of impartial government. He is not the worst senator of his generation, but he is worse than the worst of them, because the worst of them believed what they said. Graham did not believe. He knew. And knowing, he chose the road he chose, and he took the party and the Senate and a substantial portion of what remained of American foreign policy with him.

The country he leaves behind is worse for what he did to it. That is the honest sentence, and it is the one his eulogists will not speak. Most of them know it, some will say it in private, and a few have already said it to me. The ritual forbids them to say it in public, reinforced by a widely shared and largely unexamined feeling that to say what is true about a man on the day of his death is a kind of cruelty. I do not accept that feeling. I think the cruelty runs the other way. I think the cruelty is to the people who will suffer, and are already suffering, from what Lindsey Graham helped build. The dead senator does not need our discretion. The living need our truth-telling.

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The eulogy ritual is dangerous because the next Lindsey Graham is watching. There is always a next Lindsey Graham. He is somewhere in the Senate right now, or in a governor’s office, or in a House committee room, calculating what a public life of accommodation to a demagogue will finally cost him. He is looking at the tributes rolling in for the senior senator from South Carolina, and he is drawing his conclusions. The conclusions he is drawing right now, as the “great American” and “consummate legislator” and “warm friend” tributes accumulate in his feed, are that the cost is manageable, that the record can be smoothed, that the moment of death will wash the ledger clean and hand his family a folded flag and hand history a portrait suitable for the Senate wall.

The next Lindsey Graham should draw a different conclusion. Some records cannot be smoothed. Some men have done enough damage that the ritual cannot hold, and if he takes the road Graham took, the piece he will get is the piece I am writing right now. There are writers who will refuse the laundering and readers who will refuse to accept it, in a country that has begun — slowly, imperfectly, but really — to recognize that a democracy in the condition ours is in cannot afford the courtesies it once extended to its own destroyers.

The civic function of the honest obituary is to send a message forward in time to the men and women who have not yet made the choice Graham made, telling them what the record will say when their moment comes. Vengeance and celebration have no part in it. Graham himself, I suspect, understood this. He was, whatever else he was, a shrewd political operator, and he had watched enough public lives end to know how the ritual worked. He counted on it. He believed the ritual would carry him through, as it had carried through worse men before him. And he was probably right that most of the ritual will hold: flags at half-staff, tributes filed on schedule, acceptable words found for the eulogies.

But not all of them. This one will not. And if enough writers and readers refuse the ritual, if enough citizens understand what is at stake in what a country chooses to remember about its powerful men, then the next Lindsey Graham may draw the conclusion we need him to draw. At the moment of his own conversion, he may remember that the piece he will get is not the piece he wants.

Graham’s death is an occasion for the country to speak more honestly about what he was and, by doing so, to make it marginally harder for the next one to become what he became.

Senator Graham has departed us. He was a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot’s most consequential enabler. He said so himself, once, when it still cost him something to say it. In the end, his own sentence became his epitaph: a description of the man he served and of the choice by which Graham will be remembered. The eulogists may decline to name that tragedy. It stands without them.

May the country he leaves behind find the courage to look at what he built and, looking at it, resolve to build something else. That is the only tribute that would honor what was best in him. The tributes his colleagues will offer will honor only what was worst.

Go Deeper into the Circus

This is, after all, a philosophy blog.

Someone in a Signal chat last week said, in the flat pacifist maximalist way that has become the default register of American liberal ethics, that political violence is never justifiable. I said, wryly, well, that’s not really true. He asked me what I meant. This piece is the receipt for the demurral.

Before I give the philosophical answer, I owe the reader the operative one, because on this subject any philosophical treatment that does not begin with the operative holding is a treatment that has forfeited its own seriousness.

Political violence is not justified in the United States in 2026. It is not justified against the President, against members of Congress, against federal officers, against judges, against any American official or institution or citizen. I do not support such violence. I do not endorse it. I do not condone it. I would oppose it if attempted, and I would name it as the wrong choice against the tradition whose logic I am about to lay out.

I say this while holding one of the darker readings available of the American political situation. What Donald Trump and the Republican Party have been engaged in since January is an abortive constitutional coup — a systematic effort to convert the executive into an instrument unbound by law, to capture the judiciary as an accessory to that conversion, and to disable the peaceful mechanisms of correction that the framers built into the system. I have argued this in these pages at length, in the piece on a more powerful President over a weaker Presidency and the piece on the great gaslighting of America and the entire ledger of the prior pieces. I hold that reading. I have not softened it. I do not soften it now.

And I still say political violence is not justified. Because holding a dark reading of the pattern is not the same as holding a dark reading of the exhaustion. The pattern condition is met. The exhaustion condition is nowhere close to met. Peaceful avenues for the restoration of the constitutional order remain abundant. The ability to organize, to protest, to boycott, to litigate, to run candidates, to vote, to speak in public, to publish, to fund the institutions of resistance, to persuade one’s neighbors, to build the coalition that will end this — all of it remains readily available, even now, even under a captured executive and a weaponized federal apparatus. It is harder than it should be. It requires more of us than it should require. But it is available. And as long as it is available, the Declaration’s own logic forbids the resort to arms.

That is the holding. Everything that follows is the theory that produces it, and the further theory of what would have to change for the holding to change.

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Before any theory, the axiom.

The Founding of the United States was an act of political violence. The men who signed the Declaration were traitors under the law that governed them, combatants under any law that could have been applied to them, and by the summer of 1776 they were already engaged in a shooting war against a legitimate sovereign whose troops were occupying the cities they lived in. They knew what they were doing. Franklin’s line at the signing — we must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately — reads as a witticism now but was a plain legal observation at the time. The penalty for treason under English law was hanging, drawing, and quartering, and every man who signed that document was making himself eligible for it.

They did it anyway. And two hundred and fifty years later, the country they founded reveres them for it. Every Fourth of July, every schoolchild’s civics class, every naturalization ceremony, every appeal to the Founders’ wisdom in a Supreme Court opinion — the entire ceremonial architecture of American self-understanding is a monument to the proposition that this particular act of political violence, undertaken under these particular conditions, was justified. The word matters. Justified is stronger than tolerated and stronger than excused. It means a moral good in its own right, the right choice made by good men against a government that had lost the right to command their allegiance.

This is the tradition, and I think most Americans understand it at some level. Almost no one, pressed, actually holds the view that political violence is never justifiable under any conceivable circumstance. Ask a liberal whether the French Resistance was justified, or the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, or Nat Turner, or John Brown, or the American Revolution itself, and the answer will come back yes, in most cases yes, with qualifications and hesitations that are themselves an implicit theory of the threshold. The threshold is understood. What is rarely said aloud is where it sits, what conditions would move a country across it, what the citizen’s obligations become on the other side of it. Someone has to say those things. Not because the country is close to the threshold — I have already said it is not — but because a threshold that has never been spoken about is a threshold no one recognizes when it is being approached, and I would rather this country recognize the approach if it happens than fail to recognize it and arrive.

I will be the one who says it, then.

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The Declaration of Independence is a legal brief written in the cadence of a poem, and the legal brief is the part that matters. Jefferson, who was trained as a lawyer and who had spent a decade reading Locke and Sidney and the whole apparatus of English common-law resistance theory, was building an argument in the specific form arguments took in 1776: statement of the law, statement of the facts, application of the law to the facts, conclusion. The law is stated in the second paragraph. The facts are the twenty-seven-count indictment of King George. The application is the assertion that the facts satisfy the law. The conclusion is independence.

The law, as Jefferson stated it, has three components.

The first is the consent condition. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and the ends for which that consent is given are the security of certain rights — life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and, elsewhere in the American constitutional tradition, the equal protection of the laws and the due process by which those laws are administered. When government becomes destructive of these ends, the consent that founded it is voidable. This is Locke, and before Locke it is the medieval English coronation oath, and before that it is the reciprocal-obligation doctrine that runs through the whole Anglo-Norman feudal tradition. A ruler who breaks the compact releases the subject from allegiance. This has been the working theory of legitimate government in the English-speaking world for more than eight hundred years.

The second is the exhaustion condition, and it is the one contemporary invocations of the Declaration almost always ignore. Jefferson’s exact words: “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” The Declaration functions as a receipt before it functions as anything else. The entire middle of the document — the list of grievances — is Jefferson’s demonstration that peaceful redress had been sought, and sought, and sought again, and refused. “In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.” Before the invoice, the receipt. Before the right to revolution, the record of what was attempted first.

The third is the pattern condition, and it is the one that separates the Declaration from every terrorist manifesto that has ever been written. Jefferson’s phrase is exact: “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism.” The threshold is a pattern — long, sustained, invariable in direction — whose design is the destruction of self-government itself. A single injustice does not qualify, nor a bad policy, nor a leader you dislike. The test is whether the aggregate direction of state action reveals an intent to end the conditions under which peaceful correction is possible. That threshold is meant to be very high, high enough to keep the theory of revolution from collapsing into the theory of every political malcontent with a grievance and a gun.

When all three conditions are met — consent voidable, redress exhausted, pattern despotic — the Declaration does not merely permit resistance. Read the words: “it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.” The word is duty. An obligation incurred rather than a permission granted. The Founders wrote the theory of just revolution because they believed themselves to be exercising it, and they believed the theory would apply again, someday, to some government, somewhere, and they wanted that future exercise to have a standard to be measured against.

This is the liberal ethics of political violence, with real content and specific triggers, and it has been the working theory of legitimate resistance in the American tradition for two hundred and fifty years.

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This is a piece someone has to write, and I have decided the someone is me.

I understand the reasons the piece does not usually get written. The theory has been weaponized by every militia manifesto since Ruby Ridge. Timothy McVeigh cited the Declaration. January 6 rioters carried it in their pockets. Every claim to just revolution in modern American practice has been made by a right-wing insurgency operating on manufactured grievances and cosplayed exhaustion, and any writer who takes up the topic in good faith risks being placed in that company by readers who cannot or will not distinguish the analysis from the appropriation. I know the risk. I am taking it anyway, because the theory is real, and the moment is dark enough that someone the appropriators cannot easily claim needs to hold the tradition open in public, and I am willing to be that someone.

There is also the more human reason the piece rarely gets written, which is that the theory, taken seriously, forces one to hold two things at once that the ordinary rhythm of political speech does not accommodate.

The pattern condition has been met, and I say so without hedging. If you read what I have written across these pages, you already know I believe it: the pipeline that built the unitary executive, the capture of the epistemic infrastructure by donor networks pursuing structural despotism, the conversion of the Supreme Court from a check on that pipeline into an instrument of it, the ongoing project of stripping the federal workforce and installing loyalists, the deportation regime operating outside due process, the assault on the machinery that made the country legible to itself — this is a long train, and it is invariable in direction, and its design is the destruction of the conditions under which self-government can peacefully correct itself. The pattern condition is met.

And the exhaustion condition is nowhere close to being met. Elections are still held. The 2026 midterms will be held. Courts still, however imperfectly, rule against the executive when the executive overreaches — as they have in dozens of injunctions since January. State attorneys general still sue and win. Journalists still publish. Organizers still organize. Boycotts still bite. The press is diminished but functional. Congress is captured but not eliminated. States retain their sovereign machinery. The peaceful avenues have been damaged, in some cases severely, but they are not closed. They are open, they are legally protected, they are physically available to every citizen willing to use them, and they are — this is the harder part — capable of producing the correction they exist to produce, if enough people use them well enough.

So the operative fact stands: the exhaustion condition has not been met, and until it is met, the terminal remedy is forbidden by the very logic that would otherwise permit it.

But the conditions could be met. The threshold is real. It has been reached before in American history — in 1776, and arguably again in 1861 for the four million human beings held in chattel slavery, whose peaceful means of redress were literally none, whose exhaustion condition was fulfilled by the entire structure of American law, and for whom violent resistance was — as Frederick Douglass argued and John Brown demonstrated — a direct application of the Declaration’s own logic to the condition of a people whose peaceful means had been foreclosed by law. And the threshold could be reached again. In the wrong sequence of events, in the wrong five years, in the wrong compounding of failures, we could be there.

The honest liberal position, and the one that the tradition actually requires, is to name what that would look like. Because refusing to name it does not make it less likely. It makes it more likely. The threshold that goes unnamed is the threshold that gets crossed without anyone noticing until it is already behind us.

The specific triggers that would satisfy the exhaustion condition are these.

An election is canceled or its result nullified by executive fiat, and no institution — no court, no state, no legislature — is able to enforce the result. The distinction from the current moment is that this scenario is not a delayed election or a disputed election but one canceled or overturned outright, with force behind the cancellation.

An opposition politician of national standing is arrested and imprisoned on charges that are transparently pretextual, and the courts are stripped of the jurisdiction to review the charges, and the imprisonment is used to disqualify further political competition. What separates this from a bad-faith prosecution is that the machinery of law has been stripped of the power to intervene, and the imprisonment is being used structurally to remove the possibility of political opposition.

The Supreme Court is stripped of jurisdiction to hear constitutional claims against executive action, or its rulings are simply ignored by the executive with no consequence, and this pattern is established over a period of time such that it is understood by all parties as the new operating condition. This means an executive branch acting, systematically and openly, as though the judicial branch does not exist.

The press is silenced by force — by prosecution under sedition-style statutes, by regulatory closure of platforms, by physical violence against journalists that goes unpunished — such that the flow of information required for peaceful political correction is cut off. This is silencing, not criticism or lawful challenge, and it is designed to end the possibility of the governed knowing what the government is doing.

State governments that resist federal despotism are federalized by force — their national guards seized, their officials removed, their legislatures dissolved — such that the federal structure that has served as one of the peaceful means of resistance is dismantled.

And underneath all of these, the ordinary electoral mechanism — the ability of the people to choose their representatives in a free and fair vote and to have that choice respected — is ended, either by cancellation, or by manipulation so gross that the outcome no longer bears any relation to the ballot, or by the disqualification of political opposition through mass arrest.

Any two of these, occurring together and sustained over time, would in my judgment satisfy the exhaustion condition. Three would satisfy it decisively. And when the exhaustion condition is satisfied, and when the pattern condition has already been satisfied — as it has, and as I have argued at length that it has — then the consent condition is voidable, and the Declaration’s terrible sentence applies. “It is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.”

I am not saying that any of these has occurred. I am saying the opposite. I am saying that the availability of the peaceful means is what distinguishes the moment we are in from the moment the Declaration was written to address, and that the availability is real, and that our obligation as citizens is to use those means with an urgency and a competence and a coalition-discipline commensurate with the gravity of the pattern we face.

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Some readers will find even this uncomfortable. Some will accuse me of drawing a road map. They will say that naming the triggers is a form of invitation, that the threshold-in-being is a threshold-in-preparation, that even the philosophical treatment produces the political result.

This is precisely backward.

Naming the threshold is what makes the peaceful contract binding on the sovereign. A regime that believes its opponents will never resort to force under any circumstances is a regime that faces no cost for crossing any line. The line-drawer’s discipline is what constrains the line-crosser. The Founders understood this. It is why the Second Amendment exists in the form it does, however debased its contemporary invocation. It is why the militia clauses of the Constitution exist. It is why the American constitutional tradition has never been a purely pacifist tradition, and why the great pacifist figures of American history — Thoreau, King, John Lewis — always articulated their pacifism against the background of a tradition that permitted violence, and thereby made their choice of nonviolence a moral choice rather than a legal requirement. King’s nonviolence was possible because Malcolm’s alternative existed. The one made the other credible. And the American state responded to King’s discipline in part because it understood that the discipline was chosen, and that a different choice was on the table.

The regime that comes to believe its opponents have no other choice becomes the regime that treats them as though they have no other choice. This is the pattern in every consolidation of authoritarian rule, from Hungary to Turkey to the compounding drift in the United States since 2017. The despot’s confidence grows with each unpunished escalation. The escalations grow with the confidence. And the moment when the pattern could have been arrested — the moment when the sovereign might have paused to consider whether he was approaching a line his opponents would defend — that moment passes silently, because no one had spoken the line aloud.

I am speaking it aloud. Not to invite its crossing. To make its crossing more costly. To make the crossing legible, so that the day it happens, the country will know it has happened, and the tradition will have the vocabulary to say what it is.

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I want to place myself in the argument, because a philosophical piece that does not commit its author to a position is a piece that has forfeited the right to be taken seriously.

Here is where I stand.

If, tomorrow, an election is canceled by executive order and the cancellation stands, I will support organized resistance to the federal government. I will support it publicly, I will fund it if I can, and I will accept the moral responsibility that comes with saying such a thing in these pages under my own name. I do not want that day to come. I do not expect that day to come. I have been careful all my life to distinguish the darker political readings I entertain from the operational stances I take, and I am not entertaining a dark reading here. I am naming a threshold. If the threshold is crossed, I know what I would do.

If, before that, an opposition politician of national standing is arrested and imprisoned on transparently pretextual charges, and the courts are stripped of the power to intervene, I will support mass civil disobedience of the kind that risks physical harm to those who undertake it, and I will support the moral and legal doctrine that such disobedience, even when it results in violent confrontation, is justified. I will not, at that stage, support first-strike violence against officials. But I will support the resistance whose response to state violence includes the willingness to defend itself.

If the Supreme Court is stripped of jurisdiction over executive action and the stripping is enforced by the executive itself, I will support the states that refuse to comply with federal orders under such a stripped Constitution, and I will support the doctrine that federal officers who enforce those orders in defiance of state resistance may, at some further stage, be legitimately opposed with force by state actors acting under constitutional authority.

Between here and those thresholds is a large territory, and it is the territory we currently occupy. In that territory I remain a citizen who votes, who writes, who supports litigation, who funds organizing, who argues in these pages that the peaceful means are still available and must be used, and used more effectively than we have used them. I remain there because the theory itself demands that I remain there. Prudence dictates that governments long established not be changed for light and transient causes. I take that seriously. I take it as binding on my own conduct as much as on Jefferson’s.

But I do not pretend the ceiling does not exist. I do not pretend the theory does not apply. And I do not pretend that if the ceiling is broken, my obligations remain what they were beneath it.

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Liberalism, at its origin, was a revolutionary doctrine. The ethics of orderly parliamentary contestation came later. What came first was the theory that justified the killing of a king.

John Locke wrote the Second Treatise of Government against the backdrop of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which an English king was deposed by force, chased from the country, and replaced by a Parliament-selected monarch under conditions Parliament dictated. Locke’s argument for the legitimacy of that revolution is the intellectual scaffolding on which the Declaration was later built, and Locke’s argument was unambiguous: a ruler who violates the natural rights his subjects retain has broken the compact, and when the compact is broken the subjects may resume the powers they had delegated, by force if force is required. That is the entire operative content of the Treatise, and any reading that softens it is a reading that misses what the book was written to do. The book is a defense of revolution, written to justify one that had already happened and to make future ones intelligible as legitimate acts rather than criminal ones. That book is the foundation of the political tradition we call liberal.

Before Locke, the same argument was being made in the English Civil War by the parliamentary theorists who executed Charles I in 1649. John Milton, whose Areopagitica is a cornerstone of the liberal case for free speech, also wrote The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, a direct defense of regicide as a legitimate act of a sovereign people against a tyrannical ruler. Algernon Sidney, whose Discourses Concerning Government Jefferson kept beside Locke in his library, argued explicitly that armed resistance to a tyrant was not merely permitted but required, and was executed for his views under Charles II. The English liberal tradition was born in a shooting war against monarchical absolutism, and the philosophers who articulated its principles were writing either from the winning side of that war or from prison cells awaiting execution for having taken it.

The American liberal tradition inherited this directly. Jefferson wrote to Madison, in the aftermath of Shays’s Rebellion, that “a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” He meant it. He was writing to the man who would draft the Constitution, and he was arguing that the willingness of the citizenry to rise against a government that had exceeded its legitimate powers was a precondition for good government, a background pressure without which the machinery of consent would eventually collapse into acquiescence. Madison himself, who was more institutionally minded and who spent his career building the machinery that would make peaceful correction sufficient, still assumed that the ultimate check on a lawless federal government was the armed resistance of the states. This is the entire underlying premise of the Federalist argument for divided sovereignty: a federal government which trampled the states’ rights would face armed opposition from state militias, and the credible prospect of that opposition was expected to deter the trampling in the first place. Peaceful petition was the ordinary mode. Armed state resistance was the background threat that made the ordinary mode work.

The French liberal tradition made the same argument on the same premises and produced a revolution far bloodier than the American one, and the French philosophers who provided its intellectual apparatus — Rousseau, Sieyès, Condorcet — were operating within the same Lockean frame. The revolutionary generation across the Atlantic world, whatever their disagreements about religion or economics or the proper design of legislatures, agreed on the fundamental point: legitimate government rests on consent, consent can be withdrawn when the compact is broken, and the ultimate guarantor of the compact is the credible threat that its violation will be met with force.

The American abolitionist tradition, which is the tradition through which liberalism was extended to include the enslaved, understood this with a clarity that most contemporary liberals have lost. Frederick Douglass, in his 1857 speech on West India Emancipation, said flatly: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.” He then continued: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” He kept a rifle in his study. He defended John Brown publicly after Harpers Ferry. He told a congressional committee, on the record, that his own escape from slavery was an act of legitimate revolutionary violence undertaken against a state that had forfeited its right to command his allegiance. And Douglass, by the end of his life, was one of the most honored figures in the American liberal tradition, honored precisely because he had understood what the tradition required in the specific historical conditions under which he was working.

Abraham Lincoln, in his First Inaugural, told the seceding South: “This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.” Lincoln was defending the Union. He was arguing against secession on the grounds that the conditions for revolutionary right had not been met. But he was doing so within a frame that took the revolutionary right itself as given. He assumed his audience would recognize the underlying doctrine because it was the doctrine on which the country was founded and by which its legitimacy was continuously renewed.

This is the tradition. Every serious philosopher of liberalism, from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth, understood that the theory of consent implies a theory of resistance, and that the theory of resistance implies a threshold beyond which force becomes legitimate. Locke wrote it. Milton wrote it. Sidney died for it. Jefferson signed his name to a document deploying it against the government that ruled him. Madison built a constitution assuming it as a background condition. Douglass extended it to the enslaved and armed himself in accordance with it. Lincoln invoked it while arguing that its conditions were not yet present.

Recovering this tradition is the opposite of a call to violence. The tradition is what makes peaceful correction credible, because it names the alternative that peaceful correction is designed to render unnecessary. A liberalism that has forgotten its revolutionary roots is a liberalism whose peaceful methods have lost their meaning, because the peaceful methods only work when the sovereign understands that the citizenry’s patience with peaceful methods has a bottom. The Founders built the country on this understanding. The abolitionists extended it to include the enslaved. The framers of the Reconstruction Amendments wrote it into the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification-for-insurrection clause, which presupposes that armed rebellion against a legitimate government is treason precisely because armed rebellion against an illegitimate one would not be. The liberal tradition, taken whole, has always carried this doctrine inside it.

What I am asking of the reader is to hold the tradition whole. To read Locke as Locke wrote himself, and Jefferson as Jefferson wrote himself, and Douglass as Douglass wrote himself, and to notice that every one of them held simultaneously that peaceful means must be tried and exhausted before force becomes legitimate, and that when peaceful means are exhausted, force does become legitimate, and that the threshold is high but the threshold is real. The militias have made a caricature of this argument by removing the exhaustion condition and treating the threshold as though it had already been crossed. The argument itself, held whole, is the argument that produced the constitutional government they falsely claim to defend, and it belongs to the tradition that built that government, not to the movement that would tear it down.

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The interlocutor in the Signal chat said political violence is never justifiable, and I responded with three wry words because the sentence he had spoken was not one that could be answered in a Signal chat without becoming the piece I am writing now. He deserves the full answer. Everyone who has ever had that thought and left it unsaid deserves the full answer. And the country deserves someone who is willing to write the full answer down, in their own name, in a form that can be read and disagreed with and quoted and refined by anyone who wants to take up the argument.

So here it is. My name is on it. The argument stands or falls on the strength of the reasoning, and I have tried to make the reasoning as strong as I know how to make it. If you disagree with the threshold I have drawn, tell me where you would draw it instead. If you disagree that the threshold exists, tell me what you believe replaces it. If you agree, say so — not because I need the confirmation but because the tradition needs the voices.

The saving answer is the Declaration’s answer. Consent voidable. Redress exhausted. Pattern despotic. And when all three conditions are met, and only when all three conditions are met, the citizen may — must, the document says — throw off such Government and provide new guards for their future security.

We are not there. I have said so throughout, and I say it again here: the peaceful means remain abundant, and our work as citizens is to use them, to build the coalitions and institutions and habits through which they can be made adequate to the pattern we face. That work is available and unfinished, and it is what we owe to the tradition and to each other and to the country that has not yet slipped into the condition where the terrible answer applies.

But we could go there. And a country that pretends it could not is a country that will not see itself arriving until it has arrived. And a country that has surrendered the vocabulary of arrival is a country that cannot name what it is doing even to itself.

I am unwilling to be such a citizen. The three-word demurral I made in the Signal chat was small, but it was the beginning of a longer answer, and the longer answer is this: I would support political violence when the conditions Jefferson named are met, I would oppose it in every other circumstance, and I would spend my life trying to keep the country in the every-other-circumstance rather than let it drift into the one where the terrible answer applies.

That is what a liberal ethics of political violence, honestly held, actually says. And here is my on the page, holding it.

Go Deeper into the Circus

I endorsed Graham Platner. My reasons for endorsing him stand. I believe we need more people who speak like him in our politics, and none who act like this. He needs to drop out of the race for the United States Senate, and he needs to do it today.

Jenny Racicot’s account, published yesterday by CNN and Politico, is credible. CNN reviewed a 2019 email she sent to her therapist about the relationship. They reviewed a 2023 text thread with a then-boyfriend who wrote, unprompted, “I know you were assaulted.” They confirmed she disclosed the assault to two friends contemporaneously — friends who referred to Platner as “the oysterman” long before his name meant anything to anyone. She took a photograph of him. She kept the records. She warned other women on a Facebook page in 2024. She spoke to the New York Times off-record in June about a man she described as “reckless and unsettling.” And then, when Lyndsey Fifield’s account came out — the physical marks, the wrist pulled from the taxi, the arm twisted behind her back — Racicot decided she could not, in conscience, remain silent while another woman stood alone.

This is what a credible accusation looks like. Contemporaneous disclosure. Documentary corroboration. Multiple witnesses. A pattern of behavior described independently by women who do not know each other. Reporting that took months of verification by professional journalists.

It is also exactly the pattern the American right has spent a decade teaching this country to disbelieve.

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Last night, a friend texted me to crow. He is a person who believes, sincerely and with the whole of his political identity, that most sexual abuse allegations against Republican men are Democratic operations. He believes E. Jean Carroll is a liar. He believes Christine Blasey Ford was coached. He believes the Access Hollywood tape was locker room talk and the twenty-six other women were opportunists. He has told me this.

And last night, when Jenny Racicot’s account went public, he texted me to say he had been right all along.

Right about what, exactly? Right that a Democrat can be a sexual predator? Yes. Obviously. Democrats are men, and some men are predators, and no political tribe has ever been exempt from that fact. But that is not what he meant. What he meant was: see, this proves your side is the same as ours. What he meant was: this vindicates a decade of denial. What he meant was: the pattern I have spent ten years insisting is a hoax when it appears against Republicans is real when it appears against a Democrat.

The scorekeeping is the operation. The scorekeeping has always been the operation.

The American right did not, upon reading Racicot’s account, reflect on the possibility that they had been wrong about Christine Blasey Ford. They did not reconsider Leigh Corfman. They did not revisit the twenty-seven women who accused Donald Trump — a man a jury found, as a matter of law, sexually abused E. Jean Carroll. They did not pause. They did not doubt. They did not perform the exercise of asking whether the epistemic standard they were suddenly applying to Platner — believe the therapist emails, believe the contemporaneous disclosures, believe the corroborating friends — was the same standard they had refused, for a decade, to apply to their own.

They celebrated. They crowed. They said the quiet part into their phones and posted it to their timelines. They did what my friend did.

This is the great gaslighting of America. Not the individual denials. Not the individual defenses. The whole epistemic machine — the decade-long project of teaching a country that believing women is a partisan operation, that credible allegations against Republican men are fake and credible allegations against Democratic men are real, that the very pattern of evidence which corroborates one accusation invalidates another. The lie was never about any particular accuser. The lie was about the structure of truth itself.

In November or December of 2021, according to Racicot, Graham Platner entered her unlocked home after she had texted him not to come over. She was, in her words, “too exhausted.” He was, in her words, heavily intoxicated — a “blank stare” she says she still sees when she closes her eyes. She told him to stop. She batted his arms away when he grabbed her chest. She told him she was not on birth control. She told him repeatedly that she did not want to have sex. He did not stop. A sewing cabinet was knocked over in the struggle. A needle from the cabinet lodged in her leg.

The next morning, she says, he acted as if nothing had happened. When she confronted him, he said he did not remember.

Asked by CNN whether she considers what happened rape, she said: “By definition yes, absolutely yes.”

Asked why she is speaking now, she said: “There are a lot of men in this world relying on the silence of women to be where they are, and I don’t want to contribute to that.”

She agrees, for the record, with Platner’s politics. She has no incentive to want him gone from the race. She is a private citizen in a small Maine town who chose, at real cost to herself, to tell the truth about a man who is running for the United States Senate — a man whose supporters, including me, gave money to his campaign and endorsed him in public. She is doing what the moral imagination requires. She is refusing to disappear so that a political project can survive.

Platner denies it. His campaign calls the allegations “categorically false” and blames “out of state establishment operatives.” He has posted a video promising to “reflect on the best path forward.”

There is nothing to reflect on. The reporting is corroborated. The pattern is established. Lyndsey Fifield’s account of physical abuse, published by Lisa Lerer in the New York Times last month, described a man who grabbed her hard enough to leave marks, who pulled her out of a taxi by her wrist, who twisted her arm behind her back and locked her in a room. Fifield said Platner referred to his SS Totenkopf tattoo — a Nazi death’s-head insignia — as “my Totenkopf,” and knew what it meant. The Reddit posts, surfaced in October, contained victim-blaming language about sexual assault. The sexting reporting from May documented a pattern of behavior toward multiple women during his marriage. The accounts do not contradict each other. They accumulate.

Graham Platner is not a man who made one mistake. He is a man against whom a coherent pattern has been established, corroborated by contemporaneous records, on-record testimony, and documentary evidence. He must withdraw. If he will not withdraw, Maine Democrats must replace him at the ballot. If they cannot replace him, they must lose the seat rather than send this man to the United States Senate. The Susan Collins seat is not worth this. The Senate majority is not worth this. Nothing is worth this.

I will say the thing I do not think we say often enough in politics: some prices are too high. Some victories are not worth having. A party that would send an accused rapist to the Senate to keep a majority has traded its moral floor for a scoreboard.

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Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic Leader, called for Platner to withdraw. Kirsten Gillibrand, chair of the DSCC, issued a joint statement demanding withdrawal and announcing the committee will spend zero dollars if he remains the nominee. Ken Martin of the DNC called for withdrawal. Ro Khanna said: “Sexual assault or violence against women is a red line for me... These allegations are very serious and credible.” Elizabeth Warren said there was “too much at stake.” Ruben Gallego joined. Maine’s state party leadership joined. John Fetterman went on Fox News — of all places — to call on Bernie Sanders specifically to apologize for endorsing Platner. Even Our Revolution, the organization Sanders himself founded, called for withdrawal.

Jon Favreau, on Pod Save America, said Platner needs to drop out immediately. Hasan Piker, who had defended Platner through the earlier reporting, reversed on air: “That is curtains. That is the trifecta of a reliable allegation. I believe this allegation.”

Cheyenne Hunt, the attorney who founded Reckoning Action in May and who had endorsed Platner in October, withdrew her endorsement after Fifield’s account and is now providing pro bono legal counsel and press support to the women who came forward. She has said: “We have the responsibility to do what is right even when it’s politically inconvenient. Women cannot be an acceptable sacrifice for the next election.”

A political party heard a credible allegation against a man in a seat it desperately needs, and within twenty-four hours, its leadership — its full leadership, from the majority leader to the DSCC chair to the DNC chair to the progressive flank — said the same thing. He must go. The seat does not matter more than this. We will lose the majority before we will keep this man.

That is what a party with a moral floor looks like. That is what accountability infrastructure looks like when it works. Not perfectly. Not without lag. Bernie Sanders has still not made a statement on the rape allegation as of this writing, and his earlier defenses — the “nobody is perfect,” the “focus on working families,” the pattern of dismissing every prior revelation as a distraction from the material stakes — deserve their own reckoning. Fetterman is right to demand it. But even Sanders’ own organization moved. The infrastructure did what infrastructure is supposed to do.

Now hold that image in your mind. And now think about the Republican Party.

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In 2017, Roy Moore was accused of sexual misconduct with teenage girls, including one who was fourteen at the time of the alleged assault. Nine women came forward. The reporting was extensive and documented. The Republican Party of Alabama endorsed him anyway. The President of the United States endorsed him. He lost by less than two points, and half the party spent the following years insisting the allegations were fabricated.

In 2018, Christine Blasey Ford testified under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when she was fifteen. She had disclosed the assault to a therapist years before Kavanaugh’s nomination — the same evidentiary pattern that now, in the case of Jenny Racicot, is being cited by the very same right-wing media as proof of credibility. She was smeared. She was called a Democratic operative. Her therapist notes were dismissed. She was forced from her home by death threats. Kavanaugh sits on the Supreme Court today.

In 2023, a Manhattan jury found, as a matter of civil law, that Donald Trump sexually abused E. Jean Carroll. He was ordered to pay her $83.3 million in damages after a second jury found he defamed her by continuing to call her a liar. The Republican Party nominated him for President twice after this adjudication. He won. He is currently the President of the United States. He continues to call Carroll a liar. His supporters — my friend among them — continue to insist the whole thing was a hoax.

In 2025, the Senate confirmed Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense over credible sexual assault allegations, a pattern of misconduct in his prior workplaces, and a settlement he paid to a woman who accused him. I wrote about this at the time. The Republican senators who voted to confirm him did not do so because they believed him. They did so because the confirmation was the price of maintaining coalition. Sexual assault, in that vote, was priced into the deal.

That is the ledger. Trump. Kavanaugh. Moore. Hegseth. And around each of them, the same machine — the same denial, the same “she is lying,” the same “this is a political hit,” the same “the timing is suspicious,” the same “why did she wait so long,” the same accusation that the accuser is a Democratic operative, the same treatment of therapist notes and contemporaneous disclosure as evidence of nothing.

And now, on July 6, 2026, that same machine reads the account of Jenny Racicot — a woman who disclosed to her therapist in 2019, whose friends corroborate contemporaneously, whose then-boyfriend wrote “I know you were assaulted” without prompting, who has the photograph and the messages and the pattern — and treats her as credible.

She is credible. That is not the problem. The problem is that the machine that is calling her credible has spent a decade insisting the exact same evidentiary pattern is fake. The problem is that the standard is not a standard. It is a weapon. It is deployed against Democrats and withdrawn from Republicans and the difference is not evidence. The difference is jersey.

That is the gaslighting. And it is not accidental. It is a project. It has been a project for a decade, and the goal of the project has always been the same: to teach America that believing women is a partisan act. To make the epistemic ground itself into a battleground. To ensure that no matter what any woman ever says about any Republican man, half the country will already have been trained to disbelieve her.

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The great gaslighting works because it operates on the meta level. It does not, primarily, argue that any particular accuser is lying. It argues that the category of accusation is suspect. It teaches you to hear the phrase “sexual assault allegation” and immediately supply the modifiers: unverified, uncorroborated, timed-for-political-effect, coached, funded, coordinated. It trains the reflex. And then, when the reflex is trained, the specific denial does not have to be persuasive — the reflex does the work.

This is how E. Jean Carroll’s account, adjudicated by a jury and affirmed on appeal, still lives in half the country’s mind as a hoax. It is not that the evidence is contested. It is that the category is contaminated. The mind has been taught, over years, that this kind of claim is not to be trusted, and by the time the specific claim arrives with the specific evidence, the verdict has already been rendered.

The machinery has names. The professional operatives who spent 2018 destroying Christine Blasey Ford. The talk radio infrastructure that has been running the “false accusation” narrative since Anita Hill. The cable news anchors who greeted every Trump accuser with the same skepticism they have never applied to any Democrat. The billion-dollar apparatus of legal aggression, funded by the same donor network I wrote about last week — the Federalist Society pipeline, the Bradley and Olin and Scaife money that built not only the theory of the unitary executive but the epistemic infrastructure that protects the unitary executive from the consequences of his own behavior. The gaslighting and the constitutional revolution are the same project. Both depend on the same operation: teach America that the standards are not standards, that the norms are not norms, that everything is politics all the way down. If everything is politics, then Kavanaugh’s assault is politics, Trump’s rape is politics, Hegseth’s settlement is politics, and Platner’s alleged rape is also politics, because in the world the machinery has built, nothing is ever anything else.

But it is not politics all the way down. It is not. Jenny Racicot is not politics. Christine Blasey Ford was not politics. E. Jean Carroll was not politics. Leigh Corfman was not politics. Twenty-seven women who accused the President of the United States are not politics. They are people. They are witnesses to specific acts done by specific men in specific rooms, and the rooms were real and the acts were real and the harm was real and the pretense that it was all a political operation is the greatest lie the American right has ever asked the country to swallow.

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Graham Platner must withdraw. If he will not withdraw, he must be replaced. If he cannot be replaced, Maine Democrats must accept the loss of the seat rather than send him to Washington. This is not complicated. This is the moral floor.

Bernie Sanders needs to make a statement. Not a hedge. Not a “nobody is perfect” deflection. Not a pivot to housing policy. A statement. He endorsed this man. He defended this man through the Reddit posts and the Nazi tattoo and the sexting revelations. He was wrong. He needs to say so. John Fetterman is right to demand it. Silence is not neutrality. Silence is a choice, and the choice tells us what he thinks the pattern is worth.

The Democratic Party needs to keep doing what it is doing. It needs to understand that what it is doing right now — the unanimity, the speed, the willingness to lose the seat before it will send this man to the Senate — is not a weakness. It is the source of every remaining claim it has to moral authority. The instinct to defend the tribe at the expense of the truth is the instinct that has destroyed the other party. Do not become them. Do not.

Cheyenne Hunt and Reckoning Action need our support. What they built — the pro bono legal infrastructure, the press navigation, the safe harbor for women who come forward, the network that connected Racicot to a place where her account could be verified and published — is the counter-machinery. It is what accountability looks like when it is actually built rather than performed. If you have money, give it. If you have platform, use it. If you know women who have been silent because they had nowhere to go, tell them there is now, at last, a place.

And the rest of us — the ones who endorsed him, the ones who gave money, the ones who spent an evening arguing with our friends that his politics were worth defending — we owe an apology. Not to Platner. To Jenny Racicot. To Lyndsey Fifield. To every woman we told, in effect and by implication, that the material stakes of this election were higher than her account.

I endorsed Graham Platner. I was not wrong about what the country needs from its candidates. I was wrong about him. I am sorry for that. And to the women he harmed, and to the readers I asked to trust my judgment about him: I owe you better than I gave you.

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The party that is doing the right thing this week is capable of learning the wrong lesson from it. The reason Graham Platner was the nominee is that the Democratic establishment tried to hand-pick Janet Mills. Mills is seventy-eight years old. She is the governor of Maine, competent by the standards of institutional competence, and completely uninteresting to voters who understand that the country is not in a moment that rewards institutional competence. When Mills declined and Platner ran, he won the primary with seventy-two percent. One hundred and fifty thousand Maine Democrats did not vote for him because they had been fooled about his character. They voted for him because he was not Janet Mills. They voted for him because he was an oysterman and a Marine veteran and someone who did not talk like a man who had spent forty years in state government. They voted for change. They voted for it so overwhelmingly that the margin itself is a message, and the message is one the establishment has, so far, refused to hear.

The DSCC and the Maine Democratic Party must not read the Platner collapse as evidence that they should have gotten Mills across the line. They must not respond to this disaster by engineering another geriatric institutionalist into the slot. The names being floated — Shenna Bellows, Troy Jackson, Nirav Shah, Jordan Wood — are not, on their faces, all bad. Some of them are, in fact, exactly the kind of candidates who might understand what those one hundred and fifty thousand voters were saying. But the temptation, in the wake of a scandal of this magnitude, will be to reach for the safest and most establishment-credentialed option available. That instinct must be resisted.

The voters were not wrong about the appetite for change. They were wrong about the man. Those are different mistakes, and the correction is not the same. The correction is not to override the appetite. The correction is to find a candidate who satisfies it without being a monster. That is not an impossible standard. There are candidates, in Maine and elsewhere, who represent a break from the institutional past without also representing a break from the moral floor. The party’s job is to find them. The party’s job is not to use this moment as an excuse to reassert the establishment’s preferred candidate against the demonstrated preference of its own primary electorate.

To the operatives and the consultants and the committee chairs who are, at this hour, on group texts trying to figure out what to do: do not learn the wrong lesson. Do not let the establishment’s relief at being able to purge Platner become the establishment’s excuse to purge the impulse that produced him. That impulse — the demand for candidates who are not sixty-year veterans of the process, who did not come up through the consultant class, who talk like Americans and not like memoranda — that impulse is right. The country is telling you it is right. The seventy-two percent primary margin was telling you it was right. What you got wrong was the man, not the mandate. Correct the man. Do not correct the mandate.

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The thing my friend does not understand — the thing the machinery of doubt has taught him not to see — is that the asymmetry between what happened yesterday in the Democratic Party and what happens whenever a Republican is accused is itself the argument.

He thinks Platner proves the parties are the same. He thinks the fact that a Democrat can be a monster proves the moral equivalence. But that is not what it proves. Both parties contain monsters, because both parties contain men, and men, given enough power and enough darkness, produce monsters. That is not the question.

The question is what happens next. And what happens next is where the parties stop being the same.

One party heard the allegation and, within twenty-four hours, from the majority leader on down, said: he must go, we will lose the seat before we will keep him, this is the line. The other party has, for a decade, heard identical allegations against its own men and responded by circling the wagons, attacking the accusers, elevating the accused to the Supreme Court, to the Cabinet, to the Presidency itself.

That is the difference between a party that has a floor and a party that has replaced the floor with a scoreboard. And no amount of gloating, no amount of see, your side does it too, no amount of texting me at eleven at night to say you were right all along, will make that difference disappear.

I do not know what will become of this republic. I do not know if the machinery of doubt can be dismantled, if the ledger can ever be settled, if the country can ever again share a common ground of fact about who did what to whom. I do not know if Christine Blasey Ford will ever be believed by the people who called her a liar, or if E. Jean Carroll will ever be understood by the half of America that still calls her one.

But I know what I saw yesterday. I saw a party do the right thing. Fast. Without hedging. Without waiting to see how the polls broke. And I saw the other party — the party of my friend, the party of the text message at eleven at night — celebrate the fact that the other side had, at last, produced a monster of its own. As if their monsters were a defense. As if their monsters were an argument. As if their monsters were anything other than the reason the ledger will not close.

The great gaslighting of America is that they told us for ten years that believing women was a partisan project. That the pattern of evidence was fake. That the accusers were paid. That the timing was suspicious. That the therapy notes were a plant.

And now, on the day a woman came forward with therapy notes from 2019, contemporaneous disclosures to friends, a text from a former boyfriend saying I know you were assaulted, and the willingness to speak on the record at real personal cost — now, on that day, they are telling us they always believed the pattern.

They did not.

We know they did not.

And what my friend calls vindication is the last, cruelest expression of the operation itself — the belief that the truth is only true when it wounds the other side.

The truth is true. It was true when Christine Blasey Ford spoke it. It was true when E. Jean Carroll spoke it. It is true when Jenny Racicot speaks it. And the difference between the parties, in this hour, is that one of them is willing to hear it whoever it wounds — and the other, still, will only hear it when the wound serves the scoreboard.

That is the great gaslighting of America. And it has to end.

Graham Platner must withdraw. And the men who spent a decade teaching this country to disbelieve women must, at long last, be seen for what they were doing all along.

Go Deeper into the Circus

On June 30, 2026, on the Advisory Opinions podcast, the day after the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Slaughter, Sarah Isgur said this, on tape, in her own voice:

Congress has delegated so much power to the executive with no ability to claw it back, and it’s not working. And so slowly but surely Congress has died that the only thing left to do is have the court reinstitute firm barriers for the separation of powers to force Congress to do its job.

The next morning, at the Aspen Ideas Festival, on a panel called Major Questions, Major Consequences, moderated by Jonathan Capehart in the Paepcke Auditorium, she said this:

The Tariffs case is the most important case, probably of the last quarter century, because it is, again, putting the onus back on Congress. It is shrinking the powers of the presidency in incredibly important ways right now.

And in February, in The Atlantic, she published the epigram version, the one that will be quoted back to her for the rest of her career:

Trump will be a more powerful president over a weaker presidency.

This is her thesis. It is not a slip. It is not an ambush answer to a hostile question. It is the argument she has spent the past year making, in every venue that will have her — Advisory Opinions, The Atlantic, the New York Times, NPR, Aspen, Dartmouth, a book — and it is the argument she will continue to make, because it is the argument the architecture of her career requires her to make.

The argument is this. The Roberts Court, in a sequence of rulings — Loper Bright stripping agencies of interpretive authority, the tariffs case cutting presidential emergency powers, Trump v. Slaughter voiding the removal protections that had insulated independent agencies since Humphrey’s Executor in 1935 — is not, appearances notwithstanding, enlarging executive power. It is contracting the executive branch as a whole, while consolidating the president’s control over what remains of it. The result, in her formulation, is a smaller executive commanded more completely. And because the powers stripped from the agencies had to go somewhere, they go, by the Court’s logic, back to Congress — which will now, at last, be forced to do its constitutional job.

That is the thesis. It has a name in constitutional scholarship. It has a name in the concurrence of a Justice she reads aloud on her own podcast. The name is the ratchet. And the reason to write this piece is that Sarah Isgur, having read the name aloud on the record, having heard it named by Neil Gorsuch of all people, does not follow the name to where it leads.

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Read Gorsuch’s concurrence in Slaughter as she read it aloud from the tape on her own show:

It may be true that after today there is no more fourth branch of government, but the fourth branch’s powers still exist. They’ve just been reassigned to the president. And any president keen on his own authority will have a strong incentive to veto any effort to reclaim those powers from Congress. The consequence is a ratchet effect. Authorities Congress once delegated by simple majority may now require a veto-proof supermajority to retrieve.

That is Isgur’s rendition of the passage on air. The slip opinion phrases the core sentence as “the fourth branch’s powers still exist; they have just been reassigned to the President” — the ratchet, either way, is the ratchet. This is the demolition of Isgur’s thesis, delivered by the Court’s most doctrinally purist unitary-executive theorist, on the majority side of the case she has been celebrating. Gorsuch is saying: yes, the theory strips the fourth branch, and yes, the powers have to go somewhere, and no, they do not go back to Congress. They go to the president. And once they are with the president, they stay with the president, because retrieving them from the president requires overriding a presidential veto, which requires a two-thirds supermajority, which the American Congress has not routinely assembled in living memory. The delegation was a simple-majority act. The reclamation is a supermajority act. The math does not work as a forcing function. The math works as a one-way transfer. That is what a ratchet is.

Isgur reads this on the record. Her response, on the record:

He basically says, and that’s why this isn’t just Congress’s problem. He actually, you know, silently is rebutting our Congress-do-your-job thesis because he’s like, look, Congress would need a supermajority to take back some of this power. It’s not just Congress’s job. It is also the court’s job.

Register what has just happened. Justice Gorsuch has explained, in a concurrence to a decision she is celebrating, that her theory is arithmetically incoherent. She has acknowledged that he is doing so. She calls it a “rebuttal.” And then she keeps the thesis. The thesis is not modified. The thesis is not qualified. The thesis is not withdrawn. The thesis becomes also the court’s job, as if adding the court’s participation solves the arithmetic. It does not. The court cannot legislate. The court cannot appropriate. The court cannot even reliably enforce its own orders against a hostile executive. The court, in the doctrine she is defending, has just handed the president the powers of the fourth branch and told Congress to try to get them back with a supermajority. There is no version of “also the court’s job” that closes this circle.

The rebuttal is inside the tape. It is her own show. She has quoted it. And she cannot see it, because seeing it would require dismantling the thesis, and the thesis is what she has been credentialed to hold — which is a different thing from being paid to hold it, and a more damning one, as I’ll come to.

The tell is not the incoherence. Incoherence in political argument is common. The tell is the register. Notice what Isgur is doing when she says the thesis. She is not defending a novel constitutional interpretation that emerged, over the course of ordinary jurisprudential development, from a decades-long conversation among law professors and judges applying the text of the Constitution to the actual controversies of American life. She is defending a project. She uses the word herself, on the record. The larger project the Roberts Court seems to have undertaken. This is project language. Projects have designers. Projects have funders. Projects have goals set outside the process by which they are executed inside institutions.

The project has a history. The history is not a mystery. The history is fully documented and has been for decades.

The unitary executive theory as it exists today — the doctrine that all executive power is vested in a single president who must therefore command every officer exercising executive authority, that independent agencies with for-cause removal protections are constitutional impositions on Article II, that the administrative state as it developed from 1887 forward is a century-long usurpation Congress must be forced to unwind — is not the constitutional understanding of the Founders. It is not the constitutional understanding of the nineteenth century. It is not the constitutional understanding of the first two-thirds of the twentieth. It is a doctrine constructed in the last four decades of the twentieth century by lawyers working inside a legal-movement infrastructure funded by particular donors for particular purposes.

The infrastructure has a name. Its founding document is the 1971 Powell Memorandum, written by Lewis Powell — later a Supreme Court Justice — for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, calling on American business to build a permanent counter-institutional apparatus in response to what Powell described as an ideological assault on the free enterprise system. The apparatus Powell called for was built. Its financial backbone was constructed in the following decade by the Olin Foundation, the Scaife foundations, the Bradley Foundation, and the Koch network — donor structures whose wealth derived, in every principal case, from extractive and heavy industry, and whose interest in the administrative state was the interest of every regulated industry in the regulator’s disempowerment.

The institutional expression of the apparatus, on the legal side, was the Federalist Society, founded at Yale, Chicago, and Harvard in 1982 with seed money from those foundations. The Federalist Society did not invent originalism, which existed as an academic tendency, and did not invent the unitary executive theory, which existed as a fringe view. It industrialized both. It funded chairs, hosted conferences, credentialed clerks, ran the pipeline that fed the federal bench for forty years, and by the first Trump administration effectively vetted the Supreme Court short list — the three Trump appointees to the Court all came from Leonard Leo’s Federalist Society list. The doctrines it promoted did not become the law of the land because they won a fair fight in the marketplace of legal ideas. They became the law of the land because the pipeline was built and staffed and funded to make them the law of the land. (That the pipeline has since outlived its patron’s affection — Trump publicly branded Leonard Leo a sleazebag in May 2025 after Federalist Society–credentialed judges struck down his tariffs — is not a refutation of the pipeline’s power. It is a demonstration of it. The pipeline is what institutionalization means: the credentialed cohort is loyal to the doctrine, not to the patron, and continues to enforce the doctrine even when the patron who financed its ascent turns on it. That is the pipeline working as designed.)

This is the project Isgur is describing when she says the larger project the Roberts Court seems to have undertaken. She is not wrong that there is a project. She is wrong about the project’s origin, wrong about its funding, wrong about its purpose, and wrong about what “originalism” means as a description of what it does.

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The purpose of the project is not, and has never been, constitutional or historical fidelity. The plausible-sounding arguments about Article II, about the Vesting Clause, about the meaning of executive Power, about the founding generation’s supposed hostility to independent commissions — these are the arguments. The purpose is elsewhere. The purpose is to render the modern professional administrative state — upon which our modern economy and life depend — untenable within the constitutional framework as reinterpreted by the pipeline, and thus to see a complete end to the New Deal-era settlement on the role of the federal government. That is the goal. That has always been the goal. Everything else is the vestment worn over the goal.

The New Deal settlement, roughly, is this. Between 1887 and 1938, the country built a set of specialized administrative bodies — the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Communications Commission, the Food and Drug Administration in its modern form — designed to regulate technically complex industries with expertise Congress does not possess and cannot assemble. The design was bipartisan. The design was ratified by the country repeatedly at the ballot box. The design was upheld, for ninety years, by a Supreme Court that recognized Humphrey’s Executor in 1935 as the constitutional accommodation without which the modern regulatory state cannot function. The design is what makes it possible for you to trust that the pill in the bottle is the pill on the label, that the elevator in the building has been inspected, that the airplane in the sky has been maintained, that the money in the bank is insured, that the food in the grocery store is not poison, and that the water in the tap is not lead. This is not a philosophical claim. This is a description of how the country actually runs.

The doctrine currently marching under the unitary executive banner is a plan to dismantle that design by making it constitutionally impermissible. Not by convincing the country to repeal it. Not by winning legislative majorities and passing statutes to shrink it. By ruling, from the bench, that the design was unconstitutional all along, that the country was mistaken about its own founding for ninety years, that Humphrey’s Executor was a mistake now corrected, that the independent commissions Congress built to run a modern economy were never constitutional to begin with, and that the president must now command every one of them — or Congress must recover its non-delegable functions by supermajority, which it cannot, which is the point. The doctrine looks like a fight about executive power. It is a fight about whether the modern regulatory state can continue to exist. The doctrine’s real target is not the president’s control over the FTC. The doctrine’s real target is the FTC.

This is why the doctrine cannot be defended by its historical merits and must be defended, always, in the register of general principle — separation of powers, forcing function, congressional revival, the beauty of enumerated authority. The register is elevated because the mechanism is unspeakable. The mechanism is the elimination of the state Franklin Roosevelt built and the country ratified and every American under seventy has lived inside their entire life. The doctrine’s proponents cannot say this. So they say something else. They say the doctrine will force Congress to do its job. They say the doctrine will rebalance the separation of powers. They say the doctrine will produce a more powerful president over a weaker presidency. The elevated language is the vestment. The New Deal state’s dismantlement is the body underneath the vestment. This is why originalism is not a method. A method would produce results across cases. This produces one result, across cases: whatever ruling most rapidly makes the administrative state constitutionally untenable.

And notice the specific mechanism by which the dismantlement is delivered, because this is the part the funders understood from the beginning and the profession has been careful never to say aloud. The unitary executive doctrine does not, on its face, deregulate anything. It does not repeal the Clean Air Act. It does not abolish the Securities and Exchange Commission. It does not overturn the labor statutes. What it does is worse, from the regulated industries’ point of view better, and from the country’s point of view irrecoverable. It makes the regulatory apparatus unstable by design. An FTC whose commissioners can be terminated at the president’s pleasure cannot sustain a decade-long antitrust case, because the commissioners bringing the case will not be there in a decade, and the commissioners who replace them will be selected for their willingness to drop it. An EPA whose enforcement priorities are directly commanded from the West Wing cannot credibly maintain a permitting regime, because every four years the permitting regime resets to whatever the incumbent’s donors need it to be. An SEC that answers immediately to the president cannot credibly investigate the president’s donors, or the president’s family, or the president himself, because the investigators are removable at will and every investigator knows it. A Consumer Financial Protection Bureau whose director serves at pleasure cannot enforce a consent decree against a bank whose CEO donated to the incumbent’s campaign. The doctrine does not need to abolish the agencies. The doctrine only needs to make the agencies’ enforcement contingent on the political calendar, and the regulated industries do the rest — they wait out the administrations that threaten them, they fund the administrations that don’t, and they get, over time, the outcome they could never have won on the merits, which is regulation as theater, staged for the news cycle, unenforced against anyone with the resources to survive an administration.

This is deregulation delivered through the mechanism of politicized regulation. This is the outcome the extractive industries needed and could never have gotten legislatively, because the country, asked plainly whether it wants clean air and clean water and antitrust enforcement and financial fraud enforcement and workplace safety enforcement, says yes every time in every survey. The country’s answer at the ballot box is not the doctrine’s problem. The doctrine’s solution is to make the country’s answer irrelevant to the enforcement — because the enforcement is at the pleasure of a president who is at the pleasure of the donors who fund the campaigns of the party that appoints the judges who ratify the doctrine. That is the circuit. That is what the doctrine is for. The Powell Memo said so, in 1971, in language that reads today like a confession — the memo is a call for exactly the counter-institutional apparatus that would, over the following half-century, produce this exact outcome. The apparatus was built. The outcome was delivered. The country was not told.

If the professional class insists that the extractive-industry funding of the movement is coincidence rather than mechanism, look at who celebrates when the rulings come down. When Loper Bright overturned Chevron in June 2024 — a decision the professional class narrated to the country as a technical adjustment to administrative-law doctrine, a rebalancing of interpretive authority between courts and agencies, a question of judicial humility versus judicial abdication — the reaction inside the oil and gas sector was not the reaction of professionals absorbing a modest doctrinal refinement. The reaction inside the oil and gas sector was jubilation. It was championship-day jubilation. The industry knew, immediately and without ambiguity, that the case had delivered exactly the tool the industry had spent forty years funding the movement to secure: the transfer of interpretive authority over ambiguous environmental statutes from the agencies that enforce them to a judiciary the movement had spent forty years staffing. The industry celebrated because the industry understood the ruling. The industry understood the ruling because the industry paid for the ruling. And the industry knew, in a way the professional class narrating the ruling to a national audience either did not know or would not say, that the ruling was worth every dollar of the forty years of foundation grants, chair endowments, judicial-selection screening, and amicus brief litigation that produced it. The industry’s celebration is the ruling’s meaning. If you want to know what a ruling was for, watch who cheers when it lands.

The pattern repeats across the sequence. West Virginia v. EPA. The tariffs case, which the industry read as a check on presidential power to disrupt trade flows it had priced into its long-cycle capital planning. Trump v. Slaughter, which the industry read as the removal of the regulatory guardrails around the agencies it does business with. In each case, the professional class narrated the ruling as jurisprudence and the industry understood the ruling as a delivery. The professional class is not lying, in most cases. The professional class is credentialed not to see. The industry is credentialed to see, because the industry paid for the sight.

And this is why the professional-class defense — you may not agree with this interpretation, but it’s a valid interpretation, and five justices on the Supreme Court hold it — is not, when you look at what it is doing, a legal argument. It is a laundering operation. The doctrine is called valid because sitting justices hold it. The sitting justices hold it because the pipeline selected them to hold it. The pipeline selected them to hold it because the funders required a bench that would hold it. The funders required a bench that would hold it because holding it delivers, through the mechanism of politicized regulation, the deregulation the funders could not otherwise win. And the circle closes with the profession saying: well, the Court has ruled, and reasonable minds can differ on close constitutional questions. But the question was never close. The question was never even a legal question in the sense the profession pretends. The question was: will the country accept, as a legitimate exercise of constitutional interpretation, a doctrine constructed in the 1970s by lawyers funded to construct it, staffed onto the bench by a pipeline built to staff it, ratified by justices selected to ratify it, and delivering exactly the regulatory disempowerment the funders paid to deliver? That is not a question about the Constitution. That is a question about whether the country will notice.

And because the doctrine’s actual mechanism cannot survive contact with the country’s actual needs, the doctrine’s own architects periodically flinch. Consider what the Court did the same day it decided Trump v. Slaughter. In Trump v. Cook, by a 5–4 vote with Roberts and Kavanaugh joining the liberal justices, the same Court that had just voided the removal protections around independent commissions carved out the Federal Reserve — held that the Fed’s insulation from presidential removal was, uniquely, sanctioned by history and therefore preserved. Justice Barrett, in dissent, asked the question the majority could not answer: How can history support both a categorical rule and a carveout? Justice Sotomayor, dissenting in Slaughter, called the Fed carveout an ad hoc historical exemption. They are describing the same thing. What the Court has actually done is not to apply a historical rule. What the Court has done is to apply a historical rule everywhere the rule serves the pipeline’s purpose, and to except the one institution whose destruction would collapse the American financial system within a business quarter. History supports the categorical rule when the target is the CFPB, the NLRB, the FTC. History supports the carveout when the target is the Fed. The originalism is not tracking the history. The originalism is tracking the pipeline’s tolerance for consequences. Barrett saw it. Sotomayor saw it. The doctrine is a doctrine of convenience, and the majority admitted it on the day it announced it, in the same set of opinions, without noticing it had done so.

When the doctrine’s own justices cannot apply the doctrine consistently in the same set of decisions issued on the same day, the doctrine is not a method. The doctrine is a project. The project is what Isgur named. The project is what she does not name accurately, because to name it accurately is to name what her career has been for.

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Originalism, as marketed, is the doctrine that judges should apply the Constitution as its original public meaning was understood at ratification. Originalism, in operation, is the doctrine that judges should apply the Constitution as the funders of the Federalist Society need it to have been understood at ratification. Its narrow academic form — the version that says, for example, that the Vesting Clause is best read to give the president plenary removal power over principal officers exercising executive authority — has serious defenders in the legal academy, and is the version originalists retreat to when pressed in a seminar. Its maximal operational form — the version that says every independent commission Congress has built since 1887 is a constitutional imposition on Article II, that the entire architecture of the administrative state is presumptively unconstitutional, that the president may impound appropriated funds and terminate statutory commissioners at will and re-designate agency heads in defiance of Senate confirmation — has no serious defenders in the legal academy and is the version deployed in the executive order, on the podcast, in the majority opinion, in the Atlantic essay. The move is the classic motte and bailey. The narrow version is defended in the citadel where the professors live. The maximal version is used in the field where the country lives. When the maximal version is challenged, the defender retreats to the narrow version and calls the critic uncharitable. When the challenge subsides, the maximal version returns to the field. Sarah Isgur’s Atlantic essay is written in the field. Her Advisory Opinions commentary is delivered in the field. The doctrine is not a doctrine held in the seminar. The doctrine is a doctrine deployed at the agency, in the litigation, in the executive order, and in the panel session at Aspen. That is the doctrine at stake. That is the doctrine that has no serious defenders. That is the doctrine whose actual proponents are lawyers who know, when pressed, to fall back on the narrower and more respectable version they do not actually intend to enforce.

Thomas Jefferson would have understood the current unitary executive doctrine as the doctrine he fought against, and lost to for a season, and then won back at the polls. Hamilton advocated a strong executive. Hamilton lost the argument in the Constitution itself, in the way the document distributes powers — Article I first, longest, most detailed, enumerated with care; Article II shorter, less enumerated, cabined by the requirement that the executive “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” where the laws are the laws Congress passes. Hamilton lost the argument in the Federalist Papers themselves, where Hamilton’s own defense of the presidency, Federalist 69, insists at length that the American executive is emphatically weaker than the British king. Read the actual catalog Hamilton gives, in the order he gives it. The American president holds his office for four years by election; the British king holds his by inheritance for life, sacred and inviolable. The American president is impeachable and removable; the British king is not. The American president has, in Hamilton’s own words, a qualified negative over legislation — the veto, overridable by two-thirds of each chamber — while the British king holds an absolute negative over Parliament. The American president is commander in chief only of forces Congress has raised, and only when the militia has been called into federal service; the British king declares war, raises fleets and armies, and regulates them at his own discretion. The American president may grant reprieves and pardons except in cases of impeachment; the British king’s pardon reaches every offense. The American president may adjourn Congress only when the two chambers disagree on adjournment; the British king may prorogue or dissolve Parliament at will. The American president makes treaties with the advice and consent of the Senate, provided two thirds of the senators present concur; the British king is the sole and absolute representative of the nation in every foreign transaction. The American president appoints officers with the advice and consent of the Senate; the British king is the fountain of honor who appoints to every office and creates offices at pleasure. The American president has no ecclesiastical jurisdiction, no power over commerce or currency beyond what the Constitution grants, no prerogative to coin money or regulate weights and measures. The whole essay is a catalog of the powers the executive does not have.

Any person who has read Federalist 69, in the plain English in which it was published, cannot honestly argue that the Founders intended the doctrine currently marching under the unitary executive banner. Jefferson would have read the current doctrine as monarchism. Madison would have read it as a return to the abuses the Constitution was written to prevent. Even Hamilton, arguing for a stronger executive than his co-authors wanted, would not have argued for the doctrine the Federalist Society has built — because Hamilton, whatever his failings, was not stupid, and knew that a president who could fire the head of every independent commission Congress created, wage war without Congressional authorization, and impound appropriated funds at will was not the executive he was defending in 69. Hamilton was defending the president as Article II describes him. The current doctrine is defending the president as extractive industry needs him to be.

Originalism, as a school of interpretation, does not exist as a coherent method that reaches determinate results across cases. It exists as a rhetorical vestment worn over particular results reached in advance for particular reasons by particular interests. When the vestment is pulled aside — when one asks, for any given originalist ruling, what specifically about the historical record required this reading and not the plausible alternative — the answer, at the load-bearing moments, is not in the historical record. The answer is in the funders’ interest and in the movement’s pipeline. This has been documented, repeatedly, by legal scholars operating outside the movement. The most recent and most detailed of these documentations is the response of Stephen Vladeck, one of the most credentialed federal courts scholars alive, to Isgur’s Atlantic essay. Vladeck’s assessment, on the record:

Just about every part of this claim is specious... This Court, far more than any of its predecessors, has embraced expansive readings of the President’s inherent and indefeasible constitutional authority that both directly and indirectly have redounded to the short- and long-term detriment of Congress.

That is not a left-wing polemicist. That is the mainstream federal courts scholar of the last two decades, saying, on his own newsletter, in the calmest register he knows, that Isgur’s thesis is not a defensible reading of the doctrine and not a defensible reading of the record. The narrow version of the doctrine — the seminar-room version that stipulates a plenary removal power over principal officers and leaves the rest of the administrative architecture intact — has serious defenders in the academy, and Vladeck’s critique is not aimed at that version. His critique is aimed at what the doctrine actually is in the field — the maximal operational form the majority is enforcing, the version Isgur is defending in the venues where laypeople listen — and that version has no serious defenders. That version is the version that has taken the bench and is being deployed to unwind the administrative state. And that version is tolerated by the profession not because the profession finds it correct, but because expelling it would require confronting the pipeline that installed it, and confronting the pipeline would require the profession to notice what its own credentialing system has been for the past forty years. The profession does not want to notice. So the profession tolerates.

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Return to Isgur and to the question of why she cannot see the ratchet.

I have written before about the shape of the operation — the cognitive move that converts specific accountability questions into general structural claims about how anyone in the position would have behaved. That earlier piece treated the operation in the moral register, on the material of the Dispatch Podcast’s Epstein discussion. The observation there was that Isgur, asked whether the officials in the Situation Room had done something wrong, converted the question into the counterfactual whether any administration would have run the same meeting. The counterfactual has no answer. That is why it was chosen.

The operation on the constitutional material is the same operation. Asked whether the unitary executive doctrine, as currently deployed, will produce a permanent concentration of executive power over a supine legislature, she converts the question into the general claim that the doctrine will force Congress to reclaim its Article I role. The general claim has no answer. Congress will either do it or it will not, and if it does not, the doctrine will have produced exactly the concentration its critics warned about. The general claim, like the moral counterfactual, cannot be falsified in the venue in which it is being made. Which is why it is being made in this venue. The doctrine is being defended in the register in which it cannot be checked.

The character is the same character. The operation is the same operation. In one case the object is the moral responsibility of officials for their acts. In the other case the object is the constitutional consequence of the doctrine for the country. In both cases the operation converts the specific to the general and calls the general a thesis. In both cases the co-hosts and the panelists and the readers are asked to accept the thesis as sophisticated analysis when it is in fact the maneuver that professional operatives run when the specific question is closing in.

There is a reason she cannot stop running it, and this is the part that requires care, because the easy version of the argument — that she is paid to hold this view, that she is a hired mouthpiece for an ideological project — is the version that lets everyone off the hook, including her, because it treats her as an instrument rather than as a person. The instrument account is too simple. It is also, in the pipeline’s own operational terms, false. The pipeline does not buy opinions. The pipeline does something more effective, and more corrosive, and more difficult to name. The pipeline selects.

Here is how it works, in the actual mechanism, described by the academics who have documented it — Steven Teles’s The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, Ann Southworth’s Lawyers of the Right, Amanda Hollis-Brusky’s Ideas with Consequences, Jane Mayer’s Dark Money. The Federalist Society and the movement infrastructure around it identifies, at the law-school level, students who already hold the doctrine’s premises as intuitions — that the administrative state is illegitimate, that the New Deal represented a constitutional break rather than a constitutional continuation, that the federal government is too large, that regulation is presumptively suspect, that professional expertise is a form of unaccountable power. These students are not converted by the pipeline. They arrive at the pipeline already believing. The pipeline finds them and gives them the credentials that make their belief consequential. It puts them into clerkships with judges who share the belief. It puts them into DOJ roles where the belief becomes operational. It puts them into think-tank positions where the belief becomes an op-ed, and then into commentary chairs where the op-ed becomes a broadcast register, and then into book contracts where the broadcast register becomes doctrine, and then into panel invitations where the doctrine becomes conventional wisdom. At every step, sincerity is the criterion. The performer must actually believe. If she does not actually believe, the performance will not convince. The pipeline needs performers who convince because the doctrine can only be installed if the country accepts the performance as expert testimony rather than as ideological advocacy. Which means the pipeline needs sincerity. Which means the pipeline selects for sincerity. Which means Sarah Isgur is not a hired gun. Sarah Isgur is a talented and ambitious young lawyer who arrived at Harvard Law School already holding views the pipeline needed held, who was identified early, who was credentialed correctly, who clerked for Judge Edith Jones on the Fifth Circuit, who took the Justice Department role — spokeswoman to Jeff Sessions, then senior counsel to Rod Rosenstein — because the doctrine’s practitioners had built the ladder for exactly the person she already was, and who now sits in the Advisory Opinions chair and on the Aspen panel and in the Atlantic essay because the pipeline needed someone in exactly that chair, on exactly that panel, in exactly that essay, sincerely holding exactly the view she sincerely holds. The pipeline is not paying her to hold it. The pipeline built the machine that finds people who hold it, credentials them, and places them where the sincerity does the work. That is the mechanism. That is more damning than the hired-gun account, not less, because it means the sincerity is the product. It also means that any critique of the sincerity misses the point. Sarah Isgur is sincere. The doctrine is still what the doctrine is. The pipeline is still what the pipeline is. The sincerity is what makes the pipeline work.

The whole architecture presupposes that the doctrine is real jurisprudence, that the pipeline that produced her produced a legitimate legal tradition, that originalism is a method rather than a marketing operation. To see the ratchet is to see the pipeline. To see the pipeline is to see the funders. To see the funders is to see that the doctrine is not what the doctrine claims to be. To see that is to see that her career is not what her career claims to be. And the pipeline selected her, in part, because she is the kind of person who cannot see this. That is not a defect. That is the specification.

She cannot see it. So she does not see it. So when Neil Gorsuch, of all people, spells out the arithmetic on the majority side of her favorite recent case, she reads the arithmetic aloud, calls it a “silent rebuttal,” and continues on with the thesis. The tape is the tape. The ratchet is the ratchet. The performance is the performance. The performance is what her career is for.

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A word about what the professional class does with a piece like this one, and the reason none of the moves will work.

The professional class will say the argument is uncharitable, that Isgur has thought long and hard about these questions, that she has arrived at her position in good faith, that she is a serious constitutional thinker whose views deserve engagement rather than dismissal. All of this can be granted without conceding a word of the case. Sincerity is not the question. Good faith is not the question. Seriousness is not the question. The question is whether the doctrine she is defending, examined on its own terms and in the mechanism its own defenders describe, does what she says it does. It does not. Neil Gorsuch says it does not. Stephen Vladeck says it does not. The arithmetic says it does not. The historical record of the Federalist Papers says it does not. The forty-year documentary record of the doctrine’s construction says it does not. She is sincere. She is serious. She is wrong, and the wrongness is not a technical wrongness about a doctrinal minor point, but a foundational wrongness about the very structure of the American constitutional order.

The professional class will say I am insufficiently rigorous, that a proper treatment of the unitary executive theory requires engagement with the Federalist scholarly literature, that the Powell Memo/Olin/Scaife/Bradley/Koch/Federalist Society genealogy is a Kevin Kruse-style pop history and not the real story. This move is available and I decline it. The genealogy is documented in books published by university presses by scholars who spent careers on the material. Steven Teles’s The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement is the load-bearing academic treatment. Ann Southworth’s Lawyers of the Right is another. Amanda Hollis-Brusky’s Ideas with Consequences is another. Jane Mayer’s Dark Money covers the donor side. The pipeline is real, the funding is documented, the personnel are named, and the intellectual history is available to anyone who wants to check it. The professional class knows this, and refuses to say it in the venues where saying it would carry professional cost, because saying it would carry professional cost. This is what the pipeline was built to make expensive to say.

The professional class will say that I am ad hominem, that the origins of a doctrine do not determine its correctness, that the fossil-fuel money that funded the movement does not mean the movement’s conclusions are wrong, that many good doctrines have had disreputable early advocates. I concede the point in principle and reject it in application. The origins of a doctrine do not determine its correctness. But the origins of a doctrine are highly relevant to the question of why the doctrine has been elevated to the law of the land, what work it has been elevated to do, and whether its intellectual defenders are engaged in a good-faith jurisprudential project or in a legitimation exercise for a predetermined result. When the doctrine’s construction, funding, personnel, and target agencies all track the interests of a specific donor class, and when the doctrine’s actual operation delivers exactly the outcome that donor class needed — the disabling of the regulatory state, particularly of environmental and financial and labor regulation — the ad hominem dismissal is not an evasion of the argument. It is the argument.

The professional class will say, finally, that even if all of this is true, the doctrine is now the law, and the argument now must be an argument within the doctrine, that the country must accept the current jurisprudential settlement and work within it. This move is what makes the doctrine permanent. This move is the professional class agreeing, ex post, to normalize the outcome of the pipeline it declined to expose ex ante. This move is what a captured profession looks like from inside. The country does not owe the doctrine acceptance. The country owes itself the accurate account of where the doctrine came from, what it is for, and why the professional class that credentialed it did not stop it. The accurate account is available. The refusal is a choice.

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There is a version of originalism that would be interesting, and rigorous, and coherent with the text and history of the Constitution. That version reads Article I as the center of gravity — the enumerated powers, the lawmaking function, the appropriation function, the war-declaring function, the impeachment function — and reads Article II as the office charged with faithful execution of what Article I produces. That version reads the take Care clause as a duty rather than a license. That version reads the Vesting Clause alongside its structural context — the Necessary and Proper Clause, the appointments provision requiring Senate consent, the appropriations requirement, the impeachment remedy — and concludes that the president is a constitutional officer inside a constitutional order and not the incarnation of a plebiscitary sovereignty. That version reads Federalist 69 as Alexander Hamilton clearly meant it — as a promise that the American executive would be smaller than the British king in every meaningful respect. That version is available. It exists in the historical record. It is the version Jefferson believed and Madison codified and the country actually adopted.

The doctrine currently marching under originalism’s name is not that doctrine. The doctrine currently marching under originalism’s name is Hamilton on his most expansive day, funded by mineral extraction, weaponized against the regulatory state, dressed in the vestments of the founding, and delivered by a judiciary staffed through a forty-year pipeline of donor-selected credentialing. It is not the Constitution’s original meaning. It is a doctrine of convenience, fitted to a purpose, defended by professionals whose sincerity is exactly what the pipeline needed and exactly what the pipeline selected for. Sincerity is the vestment. Conviction is the vestment. Legal-craft polish is the vestment. What the pipeline needed was a class of professionals who would perform the doctrine sincerely at the moment when the doctrine was being installed as law. It found them by selection, not by purchase. It credentialed them. It placed them. It got the doctrine installed. What it did not get, and what it will not get, is the country’s consent, because the country was not asked and would not have consented and now, increasingly, is looking up and asking who moved it into this house.

The country reads. The country, given a live enough moment and a stark enough contrast, walks to the shelf and pulls down Federalist 69 and reads it in the plain English in which it was written. The country closes the book knowing it has been lied to. The country notices that the doctrine currently governing it does not appear anywhere in the founding record it was told the doctrine came from. The country asks how the doctrine got here. The answer is available. The answer has been written down, by academics working in daylight, for forty years. The country can find it.

When the country finds the answer, the professional class that has been performing the doctrine sincerely, in analyst chairs and on panels and in essays and on podcasts, will discover that the register that was rewarded for the past four decades is no longer being rewarded. The professional class does not need to see this coming to be affected by it. It will be affected by it whether or not it sees it. The doctrine’s usefulness to the funders was always contingent on the country’s not looking up. When the country looks up, the doctrine loses the only real support it ever had, which was the willingness of everyone credentialed by it to keep performing it as if it were something else.

Sarah Isgur will continue to perform it, because she cannot afford to stop. The pipeline that credentialed her cannot afford to have her stop. The venues that platform her cannot afford to have her stop. The book contract and the analyst chair and the editorship cannot afford to have her stop. She will keep performing the thesis. The thesis will keep failing at the arithmetic Gorsuch spelled out on her own show. The country will keep, slowly, doing the reading. And at some point, the number of Americans who have read Federalist 69 in plain English will exceed the number of Americans who have been told what the Federalist Society said Federalist 69 means, and the doctrine will lose the only legitimacy it ever had, which was borrowed and can be recalled.

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The title of this piece is her sentence. She wrote it in the Atlantic. She meant it as a description of a virtue. It is not a description of a virtue. It is a description of what happens when a small class of donors succeeds, over forty years, in installing a doctrine whose effect is the concentration of political power in a single office over a legislature that cannot recover its ground. Trump will be a more powerful president over a weaker presidency. Read that sentence again. Read it in the plain English in which she wrote it. The president is more powerful. The presidency is weaker. The presidency is the office. The president is the man. When the man is more powerful than the office, the office is no longer the constitutional office. The office is now the man’s. That is not a rebalancing of the separation of powers. That is the extinction of the separation of powers. That is what a monarchy is.

The country does not want a monarchy. The country did not vote for a monarchy. The country did not consent to the pipeline that installed the doctrine that produces the monarchy. The country was not asked.

The country is being asked now, whether it knows it or not. The answer is the same answer Jefferson gave, and Madison codified, and the country has, until this decade, mostly held. The answer is no.

The counterfeit fails when the mark reads.

Read Federalist 69. Read The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement. Read the pipeline’s own literature and see what the pipeline said, in its own words, about what it was building and for whom. And when the reading is done, notice who was performing the doctrine sincerely, in the analyst chairs and on the panels and in the essays, at the moment when the doctrine was being installed. Notice who told you the doctrine was originalism. Notice who told you the ratchet was a forcing function. Notice who told you the president being more powerful than the presidency was a rebalancing.

Notice, and then remember.

Go Deeper into the Circus

A follow-up to The Longest Relay, and a preface to what is to come.

On Tuesday afternoon in Colorado, at a marquee panel of the Aspen Ideas Festival, one of the most powerful venture capitalists in America told a room of the country’s governing class that the first American pope is — inadvertently, he was careful to say — an agent of the Chinese Communist Party. The joke had a theology behind it. The theology was that a bishop who asks the wealthy to consider whether the machines they are building might do damage they cannot repair occupies, by that request alone, the structural position Peter Thiel’s eschatology reserves for the figure the New Testament warns against. The qualifier does no work in that eschatology; the position condemns without regard to intent. The room did not know the theology. The room heard the joke. The room laughed.

I wrote about that laugh in The Room at Aspen. The laugh was local. The operation behind it is not — it has been running for at least three decades, in two vocabularies at once, against a mark who has been made deliberately unable to see it.

The operation is counterfeiting. Peter Thiel’s religious theories are to Christianity as the conservative legal movement’s theories about executive power are to the Founding tradition. Both are forgeries. Both borrow the authority of a tradition to authorize what the tradition, in its actual texts, forbids. Both work only on marks who have inherited the vocabulary of the tradition without the reading of it. And both are being deposited into the relay right now, at unusual tempo, because the counterfeiters can feel the window closing.

This is a follow-up to The Longest Relay, and it takes the relay as its frame. A tradition, in the sense the relay names, is a chain of readers. Each generation reads the texts and passes them forward with the reading intact. The vocabulary of the tradition — its proper nouns, its keywords, its slogans — is only the outward sign of the transmission. The reading is what is actually being transmitted. When a link in the chain stops reading and starts merely citing, the vocabulary keeps moving but the meaning drops out. The tradition becomes a set of hollow shells. And once the shells are hollow, they can be filled with anything.

The counterfeiters work the seams where the reading has thinned. They locate, with the diagnostic precision of forgers who have studied their marks, the exact places in the American mind where the vocabulary of Christianity and the vocabulary of constitutional republicanism are held with reverence but no longer read with care. And at those places, they insert their forgeries.

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Consider the Christian seam.

The tradition Thiel is counterfeiting is not a hazy thing. It is a specific chain of documents, produced by a specific institution, extended across a specific series of generations, each pope reading his predecessors and writing his own contribution into the accumulated record. In 1891, Pope Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum, an encyclical on the condition of labor and capital that formed the foundation of what has come to be called Catholic social teaching. Leo XIII wrote against unregulated capitalism, against the reduction of the worker to a factor of production, against the arrangement in which a small class of proprietors accumulated wealth on the backs of a much larger class who were denied a just wage. He wrote in favor of the right of workers to organize, the moral obligation of the wealthy to consider the effects of their arrangements on the poor, and the responsibility of the state to intervene when private power crushed the weak.

Every subsequent pope has written into that chain. Pius XI wrote Quadragesimo Anno in 1931, extending the analysis to the concentrations of financial power that had produced the Depression. John XXIII wrote Mater et Magistra and Pacem in Terris in the early sixties, extending it to development and to the arms race. Paul VI wrote Populorum Progressio. John Paul II wrote Laborem Exercens and Sollicitudo Rei Socialis and Centesimus Annus, the last of which, published in 1991 on the centenary of Leo XIII’s original document, extended the tradition to the moral evaluation of the collapse of Communism and the resulting temptation to imagine that unregulated markets had been vindicated. Benedict XVI wrote Caritas in Veritate on the moral shape of globalization. Francis wrote Laudato Si’ on the environment and Fratelli Tutti on human fraternity. And Leo XIV — the American, the Chicagoan, the man who took his name from the man who started the chain — wrote Magnifica Humanitas in May of this year, extending the tradition to the moral evaluation of artificial intelligence, and calling for the technology to be, in his word, disarmed.

That is the tradition. It is one hundred and thirty-five years of continuous magisterial teaching, each document reading its predecessors and writing forward. Any American Catholic who has read even three of these documents knows what the tradition says. The tradition says that human dignity is prior to profit. The tradition says that the accumulation of wealth without regard for the common good is a moral evil, not a moral neutrality. The tradition says that when a technology or an arrangement threatens the humanity of the person, it must be subjected to conscience and to public oversight. The tradition says that the wealthy have a positive obligation to the poor that is not discharged by charity but is fulfilled only in the reform of the arrangements that produced the disparity.

The tradition also says, with unmistakable clarity in text after text, that the concentration of power in the hands of a small class of private proprietors is one of the specific moral dangers the Church exists to name.

Now consider what Thiel does with this tradition.

Thiel has said, in public, at a lecture series in Rome no less, that the figure the New Testament calls the Antichrist will manifest in our era not as an individual with a black hat but as a world government promising to protect humanity from existential threats such as AI or global warming. This is not a joke made in passing. This is Thiel’s actual eschatology, delivered with the seriousness of a man who has spent his private hours reading René Girard and building a religious framework for his political-economic project. And the framework does specific work: it names any coordinated human response to the concentrations of technological power — precisely the responses the Church’s social teaching has been calling for since 1891 — as the sign of the coming Antichrist.

This is the counterfeit. Thiel takes the vocabulary of Christian eschatology — Antichrist, apostasy, the Beast, the false prophet — and inverts it. In the actual tradition, the sign of Christ is the constraint of power in service of the weak. In Thiel’s counterfeit, the constraint of power is the sign of the Antichrist. The pope who asks the wealthy to slow down is, by that request alone, structurally the Antichrist. Not because he means to be. Not because he plots to be. Because his position — the position of moral authority calling for restraint on private power — is, in Thiel’s theology, the mark of the beast.

The tradition condemns what Thiel is doing. The counterfeit uses the tradition’s own vocabulary to condemn what the tradition commands.

This works only on marks who have inherited the word Antichrist without ever having read Rerum Novarum. It works only on Christians who know their eschatological vocabulary from Left Behind novels and Sunday-school flannelgraphs but who have not sat with the actual social teaching of their own church across a century and a half. It works only where the reading has thinned. And where the reading has thinned, Thiel and Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen and the whole postliberal-integralist apparatus have inserted a counterfeit theology in which the wealthy are the persecuted righteous and the pope who names their arrangements is the enemy of God.

The forgery is exquisite. It requires the tradition’s authority to work. It could not be delivered in a secular vocabulary — a secular defense of oligarchic power would be recognized instantly for what it is. So the forgers reach into the sacristy, pull down the vestments, and preach oligarchy from the pulpit. And in rooms like the one at Aspen on Tuesday, the mark laughs at the joke, because the mark has been trained to recognize the vestments but was never trained to read what was preached from them.

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Now consider the constitutional seam.

The tradition here is likewise not a hazy thing. It is a chain of documents produced by specific men in a specific decade, extended forward through a specific series of legal generations, each interpreting the founding texts against the accumulated jurisprudence. In 1787 and 1788, a series of essays appeared in New York newspapers under the pen name Publius, written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, arguing for the ratification of the proposed Constitution. We now call them The Federalist Papers. They are the closest thing the American republic has to a set of founding intentions written by the founders themselves, in real time, addressed to the citizens whose votes would decide whether the document would come into force.

Federalist 69 is Hamilton’s essay on the presidency. It is written to answer a specific charge — that the proposed executive would be a monarch in republican clothing — and Hamilton answers the charge point by point. He compares the president to the King of Great Britain across a sequence of powers, and at every point he demonstrates that the president is less powerful than the king. The president serves four years; the king serves for life. The president can be impeached; the king cannot. The president is elected; the king is hereditary. The president shares the treaty-making power with the Senate; the king holds it alone. The president shares the appointment power with the Senate; the king holds it alone. The president cannot dissolve the legislature; the king can. The president has no religious authority; the king is the supreme head of the Church of England. The president has a qualified veto that Congress can override; the king has an absolute veto. On charge after charge, Hamilton demonstrates that the American executive is a bounded office, constrained by the other branches, checked by the electoral cycle, disciplined by impeachment, and comprehensively unlike the monarchical power the Revolution had been fought to escape.

And Hamilton, at the end of the essay, delivers a line that ought to be branded onto the desk of every American law student in every constitutional law course in the country: “What answer shall we give to those who would persuade us that things so unlike resemble each other?”

That is the founding tradition’s answer to any argument that the American presidency was designed to be more powerful than King George III. Hamilton wrote the answer in 1788. He wrote it to demolish exactly the argument that Peter Thiel made at Aspen on Tuesday.

Federalist 69 is the tradition. It is not obscure. It is not disputed. It is one of the most famous essays in the American constitutional canon, taught in every survey course on the founding, cited in Supreme Court opinions across two centuries. Any American who has read it — really read it, with attention to what Hamilton is doing — knows that the constitutional design was, at every point, the deliberate construction of a bounded and constrained executive. The Founders did not fear King George III abstractly. They had just fought a war against him. They designed the office they were creating specifically not to be his office.

Now consider what the conservative legal movement has done with this tradition.

Beginning in the 1980s, a group of lawyers associated with the Federalist Society, the Reagan Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, and a cluster of academic postings began developing what they called the unitary executive theory. In its early versions, the theory made a narrow claim: that the president had complete authority over subordinate executive-branch officials, and that so-called independent agencies were, to some degree, in constitutional tension with Article II. This was a debatable position, held by serious lawyers, and if it had remained in that form it would have been unremarkable.

But the theory did not remain in that form. Across four decades, the movement’s scholars developed it into something the early proponents themselves would not have recognized. In John Yoo’s hands it became a theory that the president’s war powers lie beyond the reach of statute — the theory of the torture memos, the theory under which the executive may disregard the laws Congress writes to constrain him. And in the hands of the theorists closest to the current administration, it has become a doctrine under which the president can ignore statutes that limit executive discretion, can direct the Justice Department against his political opponents, can pardon his associates for federal crimes, can order military operations Congress has not authorized, can fire the head of every independent commission Congress created to insulate its work from him, can defy congressional subpoenas, and can, in the most extreme versions now circulating, suspend the constitutional order in a declared emergency without answering to any other branch. Some of the theory’s own founders have recoiled from what it became; Steven Calabresi, who helped build the early doctrine, has objected loudly to some of its current applications. The objections have not slowed it. A counterfeit, once deposited, does not need its engraver’s permission to circulate.

And these theorists claim — with the entire apparatus of citation and footnote and law review article and originalist methodology — that this is what the Founders intended. They cite Federalist 70 selectively, extracting Hamilton’s argument that the executive requires energy while ignoring that Hamilton’s whole point was that the bounded executive he had designed would supply the necessary energy without becoming a king. They cite the Vesting Clause of Article II — the executive power shall be vested in a president — as though the clause were a freestanding grant of unlimited power rather than the designation of an office whose powers are enumerated in the sections that follow. They make much of the fact that Article I grants Congress the legislative powers herein granted while Article II omits the qualifier — as though the men who spent the summer of 1787 enumerating, qualifying, and dividing every power they named had smuggled an unbounded one through a participle. They do not, ever, deal seriously with Federalist 69. They cannot. Federalist 69 is the document that answers their argument in advance, in the words of the founder whose energy-of-the-executive argument they cite when they want energy and abandon when they want to explain why the founder they cite for energy also spent an entire essay demolishing the very kingship they are trying to reconstruct.

The tradition condemns what the unitary executive theorists are doing. The counterfeit uses the tradition’s own vocabulary to authorize what the tradition forbids.

This works only on marks who have inherited the word originalism without ever having read the Federalist Papers. It works only on Americans who know that the Constitution is sacred but have never sat with the texts that explain what it means. It works only where the reading has thinned. And where the reading has thinned, the Federalist Society and the Claremont Institute and the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the whole apparatus of conservative legal scholarship have inserted a counterfeit constitutionalism in which the president can do what the actual Constitution was written to prevent.

The forgery is likewise exquisite. It requires the tradition’s authority to work. A secular defense of executive absolutism would be recognized instantly. So the forgers reach into the archive, pull down the vestments of originalism, and preach the unitary executive from the pulpit of the Founders. And in courtrooms and law reviews and confirmation hearings and Federalist Society speeches, the mark nods along, because the mark has been trained to recognize the vestments but was never trained to read what was preached from them.

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The two counterfeits are not two coincidences. They are one project.

The men who write the postliberal theology and the men who write the unitary executive doctrine are the same men, or they went to law school together, or they publish in the same journals, or they draw stipends from the same foundations, or they meet each other at the same conferences, or they were classmates at Yale Law and Chicago Law and Harvard Law and the theology department at Notre Dame. Vermeule is a Harvard law professor whose common-good constitutionalism runs through the postliberal journals. First Things has published the Catholic integralists alongside the constitutional originalists. The Federalist Society hosts panels on natural law and religious liberty. The Claremont Institute publishes Catholic postliberals alongside their unitary-executive scholars. The Ethics and Public Policy Center runs fellowships that alternate between theological and legal projects, funded by the same donors, staffed by the same networks, attended by the same speakers.

This is a single class of counterfeiters, working two seams of the same relay, using the same methods, funded by the same money, produced by the same institutions, and pursuing the same goal.

The goal is to transfer the American franchise from citizens to a small class of proprietors, and to do it in a way that convinces the citizens they were never entitled to the franchise in the first place.

The counterfeit religious theories authorize the concentration of economic and technological power in the hands of the counterfeiters’ patrons. The counterfeit constitutional theories authorize the concentration of political power in the hands of the counterfeiters’ patrons’ preferred executive. The two counterfeits, running together, produce a country in which economic power is unchecked because the tradition that condemns unchecked economic power has been forged into a tradition that celebrates it, and political power is unchecked because the tradition that constrains political power has been forged into a tradition that celebrates its expansion. The forgeries reinforce each other. The oligarch is protected by the sanctified vocabulary of the Christian eschatology counterfeit. The president who serves the oligarch is protected by the sanctified vocabulary of the unitary executive counterfeit. And the citizen, who ought to be able to reach into either tradition for the tools of resistance, finds only shells, because the shells have been hollowed out and filled with the theology of serfdom.

This is not an accusation of bad faith against every individual involved. Many of the participants are, I think, sincerely convinced by the arguments they have inherited. The relay has thinned in the counterfeiters’ own generation as well; the young lawyers who join the Federalist Society and the young theologians who publish in First Things have themselves, most of them, inherited the vocabulary without the reading. They believe what their teachers taught them. The counterfeiting is the more effective for being distributed across a network of true believers who no longer know they are transmitting forgeries.

But the origination of the counterfeits is not innocent. The men at the top of these networks — the Thiels, the Yarvins, the Vermeules, the architects of the current administration’s legal doctrine — know exactly what they are doing. They know the tradition condemns them. They know the readers would see through the forgery. And they have made a several-decade-long institutional bet that the readers can be prevented, in sufficient numbers, from becoming readers. They have bet on the thinning. They have accelerated the thinning. And they are cashing the winnings, right now, at Aspen and in courtrooms and in confirmation hearings and in executive orders, before the thinning can reverse.

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The mark, in this arrangement, is robbed twice.

The first theft is the franchise. The American citizen is asked to sign away their inheritance — their political participation, their economic dignity, their religious tradition’s actual social witness, their constitutional protection against consolidated power — under the impression that they are defending it. They are told the pope is the Antichrist for asking the wealthy to consider restraint. They are told the president must be more powerful than King George III to preserve liberty. They are told this in the vocabulary of their own inheritance, so that resistance to the counterfeit feels, to the mark, like resistance to the tradition. The mark signs. The franchise transfers.

The second theft is the record. Once the counterfeit has been widely enough deposited, the mark loses access to the tradition that would have armed them against the fraud. If enough American Catholics have been taught that solidarity is Antichrist, then when a reader tries to point them at Rerum Novarum they will hear the reader as a heretic. If enough American conservatives have been taught that Federalist 69 was a piece of anti-Federalist propaganda or a minor essay superseded by later doctrine, then when a reader tries to point them at Hamilton’s actual argument they will hear the reader as a liberal partisan. The counterfeit does not merely fool the mark. It closes the mark’s access to the very texts that would undo the counterfeit. The mark is not only robbed of the franchise. The mark is robbed of the ability to know they have been robbed.

This is inheritance theft. It is the specific crime the relay was constructed, across three thousand years, to prevent. It is why the witnesses died — Socrates in the hemlock, the young man in Jerusalem, the martyrs of every subsequent century — so that the record of the substrate would survive their killers. And it is being reversed, right now, in real time, in our lifetimes, by a small class of forgers who have identified the exact places in the American mind where the record has thinned and are inserting their signatures where the readers ought to be.

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And yet.

The forgers are working at their frantic pace for a reason. The reason is that the window is closing on them, and everything about the tempo of the work in 2026 — the panels at Aspen, the executive orders, the theology conferences, the Supreme Court cert grants, the Magnifica Humanitas mockery, the postliberal manifestos, the accelerated confirmation hearings — is the behavior of counterfeiters who can feel that the room they have been working in is about to be lit from outside.

Russia is on the back foot. Four years into a war of aggression it launched under the assumption that Ukraine would fall in three days, its army has been ground into a condition its planners did not model. Its economy has been narrowed to a war economy that cannot be sustained without foreign inputs its sanctions have made scarce. Its demographic base for further mobilization has been exhausted. Its equipment reserves have been drawn down to Soviet-era stockpiles that were never intended to see combat. Its air force has been made cautious by a Ukrainian air defense network that did not exist four years ago. Its Black Sea fleet has been driven from Sevastopol by a country with no navy of its own. The Russian regime remains dangerous — a wounded predator is more dangerous than a healthy one — but the myth of Russian military invincibility that authoritarian regimes across the world spent a decade importing has been destroyed on video, hour by hour, in a hundred thousand drone strikes that anyone with a phone can watch.

The drone strikes are the second thing. Drone warfare has inverted the offense-defense calculation that made industrial powers feel confident about their capacity to project force. A five-hundred-dollar quadcopter, produced in a garage from commercial components, can destroy a five-million-dollar tank produced in a state defense conglomerate. A swarm costing a few hundred thousand dollars can saturate the defenses of a warship costing several billion. The mathematics of coercion has changed, and it has changed against whoever needs to move concentrated, expensive mass through contested space — which is not the same thing as saying it has changed in democracy’s favor. The same inversion that ground Russian armor into the mud closed the Strait of Hormuz to the United States Navy this spring: cheap mines, cheap drones, and mobile antiship missiles held the world’s most important chokepoint against carrier groups for a hundred days, and the reopening came by memorandum, not by minesweeper. The drone is even-handed. It favors the denier over the projector, the garage over the shipyard, whoever holds the ground over whoever must cross the water. Every strategic planner on earth — in Beijing and in Washington equally — is looking at assumptions from four years ago and finding that the assumptions no longer describe the world.

And Iran. Iran deserves more than a line in anyone’s balance-of-power survey, because Iran is not a data point. Iran is the third seam — the one where the operation finished.

The tradition the ayatollahs counterfeited is one of the great witness-traditions of the record. Its founding event is Karbala: Hussein, the Prophet’s grandson, refusing allegiance to a corrupt sovereign and dying for the refusal, with his family, in the desert, in view of the army that killed him. Shia Islam is, in its marrow, the tradition of the martyr against the throne. For most of its history its political posture was quietist — no rule fully legitimate until the Hidden Imam returns, the clergy as readers and guardians of the record, not its enforcers. Khomeini’s velayat-e faqih — guardianship of the jurist, the doctrine that a cleric should hold sovereign power in the Imam’s absence — was an innovation, and the senior clergy of his own generation said so, and the seminaries of Najaf have quietly declined to endorse it from that day to this. It was a forgery worked at a thinned seam: a vocabulary held with total reverence — Karbala, martyrdom, the oppressed — deposited into a population whose access to the tradition’s actual jurisprudence ran through seminaries the new state would come to control. The tradition of the martyr who refused the sovereign became the charter of a sovereign who manufactures martyrs. The mostazafin — the dispossessed, the tradition’s moral center — became the regime’s brand name while the Revolutionary Guard grew into a sanctions-evasion conglomerate with a navy. It is the sacristy move, executed in a different sacristy. Pull down the vestments of Karbala and preach the castle from the pulpit.

And note the eschatology, because it rhymes. Thiel’s framework runs on the katechon — the restrainer of Second Thessalonians, the figure who holds back the Antichrist — and he has spent years positioning his own class as that figure. The Islamic Republic’s official self-understanding is structurally identical: the guardianship state as the thing that holds the community until the Mahdi’s return. Two self-appointed eschatological gatekeepers, and in both cases the gatekeeping happens, by remarkable coincidence, to require the gatekeeper’s permanent enrichment and permanent immunity from restraint. Two forged apocalypses, one function. An end-times story whose practical content is: never audit the castle.

What makes Iran instructive is that the operation there is complete — and that completion, it turns out, is not rest. The second theft is finished. The readers were driven into exile and prison and the diaspora; the record was closed; the forged theology fused with the state. And what the finished counterfeit produces is not a settled tyranny. It is a permanent war between the castle and its own streets.

Consider the sequence of this year, because the sequence is the argument. In late December the rial collapsed, and the largest uprising since 1979 came out of the bazaars and spread to more than two hundred cities. The regime’s answer, in the second week of January, was massacre — live fire ordered from the top, carried out under a total internet blackout imposed so that the world could not count the dead. The confirmed dead number in the thousands. The credible estimates run into the tens of thousands; a list of deaths registered in civilian hospitals, reported by Time after the blackout, ran past thirty thousand for the eighth and ninth of January alone. The regime’s own figure is a fraction of that, and the regime, by consistent reporting, billed the families for the bullets. The executions that followed run at a scale unseen since the late 1980s — since, that is, the era of the very massacre Montazeri wrote his letters to protest. The crime he lost the succession over has returned, enlarged, under the son of the man he wrote to.

Then, in February, with the streets still bleeding, the current administration — running on the forged constitutional doctrine of the seam above, waging war on the strength of it, without Congress, as I wrote in On What We Are Permitted to Notice — launched, with Israel, an air war that killed the Supreme Leader. And here is the fact the balance-of-power surveys cannot metabolize: the castle held. The succession ran to Khamenei’s son — hereditary transfer inside a system whose founding forgery was justified as the abolition of monarchy — while people celebrated the father’s death in the streets and chanted death to the son from the rooftops, and the castle held anyway, because the castle was never the man and is no longer the faith. The ring of proxies the regime spent forty years building has been largely broken — Hezbollah degraded, Assad fallen, Hamas shattered as a governing force — and the castle held. The ring was strength. The castle is not strength; the castle is structure, and structure is what forgery buys. The Revolutionary Guard closed the Strait of Hormuz with mines and drones and small boats, held it against the United States Navy, watched Washington ask its allies for a coalition and get refused by nearly every one of them, ended the war not in surrender but in a memorandum — and then sent its negotiators to Doha, where, as I write this, American envoys are reported to be haggling over whether Iranian tolls on the world’s shipping will be charged at all. A toll gate on the commerce of the world, manned by armed men, its revenues a subject of the peace. The feudal theory of office, playing out on water.

So do not say Iran has been humiliated. It has the upper hand in its war with America and it holds the gate it built. And do not say Iran is strong. It is broke, ringed by neighbors who despise it, and at war with its own population — a war it must now fight forever, because this is the terminal condition of a finished counterfeit. A forgery persuades until it doesn’t. When the reading returns — and in Iran the reading has returned; the streets are the reading — the counterfeit can no longer work as forgery and must work as force. The vestments stop convincing and the garrison starts shooting. This is the most expensive form of rule there is: a state that must massacre its subjects to keep an inheritance it stole from them, with no mechanism left for converting force back into belief. The castle wins abroad and dies at home, and the winning abroad buys back nothing at home, because a toll gate has never once produced a believer.

I do not write any of this in admiration, and I do not write it in reassurance. The predator is wounded, and I said above what wounded predators are; this one has just buried a leader it could not protect and needs its subjects united around a grave they danced on. I write it because the war of 2026, read through the frame of this essay, was not democracy against autocracy. It was castle against castle — a captured executive, running on forged constitutional doctrine, against a completed theocratic barony running on forged theology, with the world’s oil as the stakes, a tariff schedule as the treaty, and the barony’s own subjects being shot for chanting from their rooftops while the negotiators talked tolls. That is what the counterfeit produces when it wins on both sides of a border. And it is the picture the American mark should study, because the finished counterfeit is not a foreign curiosity. It is the destination.

The equivalence — and I am being exact — is between the castellans, not the peoples and not the traditions. The Iranian relay has readers, and they are not dormant the way the American readers are dormant. They are awake and being fired upon. The generation that filled the streets under Woman, Life, Freedom filled them again this winter, in two hundred cities, knowing the price, and paid it. The quietist clergy never signed. The diaspora keeps the actual tradition in print beyond the censors’ reach, and it kept the count of the dead when the regime cut the wires precisely so that there would be no count. And Montazeri — Khomeini’s own designated heir — wrote letters to Khomeini in 1988 protesting the mass executions of prisoners, and it cost him the succession, and the letters survived him: a recording of him confronting the death committee surfaced in 2016, twenty-eight years on, and tore through a generation born after his disgrace — the generation now being buried under the same impunity the letters named. The readers exist. The counterfeit rules them by fire alone. The distance between those two facts is the entire hope of this essay, and the entire warning.

And China. China is not a finished counterfeit and not on its back foot; China is a planner reading a map. Its demographic curve is now catastrophic and cannot be reversed within the strategic horizon that matters. Its property sector is in a controlled deleveraging that has already consumed a generation’s savings. Its industrial overcapacity has produced trade retaliations from countries China cannot afford to alienate. Its Belt and Road project has become, in country after country, a burden rather than an asset. Its ally in Moscow is a spent force. Its ally in Tehran has been decapitated and has held its structure only by shooting its own people in the streets — which is instructive, and not comforting, and not, from Beijing’s angle, obviously a template that scales. And its calculation on Taiwan, which assumed a certain relationship between mass and capability, has been destabilized by the same drone mathematics that ground the Russians down and held the strait — mathematics that cut, in the Taiwan case, both ways, and no planner in Beijing can now say with confidence which way they cut harder. Xi Jinping is running a strategy designed for a world that no longer exists, and the top of the Chinese Communist Party knows it.

Into this world — a world in which the autocratic story is contestable in public for the first time in a generation, in which the myth of Russian arms has been destroyed on video and the Chinese model is visibly straining and the Iranian counterfeit is burying a leader it could not protect and murdering its own citizens by the tens of thousands to hold streets it has already lost — the American governing class is being invited by the counterfeiters to abandon its own democracy. To sign away the franchise. To accept the theology of serfdom. To move, willingly, into the finished castle. The counterfeiters need the American mark to sign before the American mark looks up and sees where in history it is standing — and before the mark notices that the war this spring was two castles negotiating a toll, and asks who moved his country onto that side of the table.

Because if the American mark looks up — if the American Catholic reads Rerum Novarum, if the American constitutionalist reads Federalist 69, if the American citizen understands that the vocabulary they have been given to describe their inheritance has been forged against them — the counterfeiters lose. And they lose not only in America. They lose everywhere the American example reaches, which is everywhere.

The Berlin Wall did not fall because of policy. It fell because East Germans looked across the wall at West Germans, and at some point in the late 1980s a critical mass of them decided that the story their regime had told them about the West — that the West was decadent, that democracy was a fraud, that their captivity was the future of humanity — was false. The image did the work. The example did the work. The demonstration that ordinary Germans, of the same language and history and neighborhood, were living differently on the other side of a concrete barrier — that demonstration ended the German Democratic Republic, and its cognates ended Poland and Hungary and Czechoslovakia and Romania, and finally the Soviet Union itself.

The autocracies of 2026 tell their subjects a version of the same story the East German regime told. American democracy is dying. American democracy is a fraud. Your captivity is the future. The counterfeiters in America are their subcontractors. Every forged theology, every forged constitutional doctrine, every laugh at every Aspen panel, is imported by the autocratic regimes as evidence that the American example is not available and cannot be trusted. The counterfeiters produce, in America, the picture the autocracies need their subjects to see when the subjects look toward America.

But an America that repairs its own relay — that names the counterfeits, that reads its own texts, that casts off the fascist capture, that publicly and visibly restores its own democratic order under conditions of maximum stress — would produce a different picture. And that picture would travel. It would travel to Tehran and to Moscow and to Beijing and to Hong Kong and to Caracas and to Havana, and it would do to those regimes what the West Germans did to the East Germans. It would find, in Tehran, readers already trained to receive it — the picture only works where there are eyes that can read it, and the Iranian readers are among the best-trained on earth. It would end the story. It would collapse the narrative that has been sustaining a decade of authoritarian confidence. It would confront every subject of every autocracy with the fact that the future they were promised was a lie their regime imported from American forgers who were themselves being paid to produce it.

This is the greatest political upheaval available to us. It is not guaranteed. It is not even likely, in the way normal historical developments are likely. It is a possibility — the specific possibility that arises when a great democracy under active attack recovers itself in view of a watching world at a moment when the alternatives are visibly, materially, mathematically strained. It has happened before. The world has been reordered before by American examples. And the counterfeiters know this. The counterfeiters know exactly this. Everything they are doing is calibrated to prevent it.

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What follows in these pages will be about the possibility. What it requires. What it costs. What it looks like when a democracy actually repairs its own relay under attack. I have spent the last year writing pieces of this argument in fragments — on the founding, on the tradition, on the relay itself, on what witnesses do, on how counterfeits collapse against readers. The fragments are converging. This piece is the setup for the convergence. What I am telling you is that the argument I have been developing is not academic and is not decorative. The argument is that we are standing at a moment when the whole three-thousand-year record can be seized by counterfeiters, or the whole three-thousand-year record can be seized by readers, and the seizing will happen in the next five years, and the American mark’s choice — reader or dupe — will determine which seizing wins.

I want you to notice, if you have been reading these pages for a while, that the arc is not what it appeared to be. The arc is not domestic partisan politics. The arc is the relay. The relay is what I have been writing about all along. The counterfeits at Aspen and in the Federalist Society and in First Things and in the executive orders are the local, visible, tactical expression of a global operation against the substrate — the same operation that killed Socrates and crucified the young man in Jerusalem and burned the Cathars and hanged the Quakers and shot the abolitionists and interned the dissidents in every century of the record. It has always been the same operation, and it has never once respected the walls of the relay’s own institutions. The Church that carried Rerum Novarum forward is the institution that lit the fires at Béziers. The republic that carries the Federalist forward is the republic whose officers write the unitary executive. The guardians of Karbala built Evin. The operation works from inside, which is why the safeguard has never been deference to the institutions of the relay. The safeguard is the reading. The operation is happening now with unusual technological scale and unusual coordination and unusual visibility, and it is happening at a moment when the countervailing possibility — the reader’s possibility, the witness’s possibility, the substrate’s own capacity to break through the forgery — is also at unusual scale.

The counterfeiters are betting the mark does not read. The witnesses are betting the mark does.

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I think the mark reads. I think the American, given a live enough moment and a stark enough contrast, walks over to the shelf and pulls down the encyclical and reads it. I think the American, given the same moment and the same contrast, pulls down the Federalist Papers and reads Federalist 69 and closes the book knowing they have been lied to. I think this because I have watched, over the last decade, the entire architecture of the counterfeit produce not the sedation it was designed to produce but a growing, restless, half-articulate suspicion in exactly the class of citizens the counterfeit was aimed at. The reading has thinned but the readers are not gone. They are dormant. They can be woken.

And I think the comeback is likely. Not certain — nothing in politics is certain — but likely, because the priestly class and the counterfeiters are surrounded. They are surrounded abroad, by autocracies whose story is failing on video, and they are surrounded at home, by a citizenry that has watched a decade of counterfeiting produce not consent but suspicion. The men who wrote the doctrine are named. The rooms they meet in are described. The panels they hold are quoted back to them in real time. The pope they mocked at Aspen wrote Magnifica Humanitas and the encyclical is in print and cannot be recalled. The Federalist Papers are still on the shelf and the Federalist Society has never been able to remove them. Every move the counterfeiters make against the record deposits more of the record into public view. The forgery is loudest at the moment before the mark looks up, and the mark is beginning to look up.

And I think the moment is now. Whether any individual forger reads the map this way is a question about souls, and I argued in the Aspen piece that the theology does not require intent. Neither does the tempo. Russia’s myth is broken on video. The drone has made every castle’s arithmetic uncertain, including the forgers’ own. The Iranian counterfeit has been forced to show the world what it is — a barony charging tolls, burying a leader it could not protect, murdering its own citizens by the tens of thousands to hold streets it has already lost. China’s planners are staring at a map their strategy was not drawn for. And at home, the priestly class — the postliberal theologians, the unitary executive theorists, the Aspen panelists, the First Things editors, the Federalist Society officers, the confirmation-hearing scriptwriters — has been forced into the open by the tempo of its own project, and the open is where it cannot win. It could win in the sacristy. It could win in the law review. It could win in the fellowship program. It cannot win in a country whose citizens have been given a stark enough contrast to look up, and the contrast is being provided daily by the counterfeiters themselves. The window is closing on the project whether or not the men working the seams can name what is closing it. Counterfeiters do not need to see the dawn to feel the room getting lighter. They can feel the reading returning. They can feel the possibility that the American mark will, in the next five years, walk to the shelf.

If the mark walks to the shelf, the counterfeit fails. If the counterfeit fails, the American example becomes available again to a watching world. If the American example becomes available to a watching world that has just watched the autocracies’ story falter, the world reorders. Not through American arms. Not through American diplomacy. Through the same mechanism that ended the Cold War: the demonstration, in view of everyone, that democracy is possible and captivity is not necessary.

That is the greatest political upheaval in human history. It is available to us. It requires only that we read.

Read Rerum Novarum. Read Magnifica Humanitas. Read Federalist 69, and then read Federalist 70 and 71 and 72 and 73 and understand what Hamilton was actually saying about the executive and why the unitary executive theorists have to lie about him. Read the Apology of Socrates. Read the Sermon on the Mount. Read Montazeri’s 1988 letters. Read the speeches of Frederick Douglass and the second inaugural of Lincoln and the Letter from Birmingham Jail. Read the record. The record is the antidote. The record is what the counterfeiters cannot survive.

The relay is not dead. It is waiting.

What comes next in these pages is the case that the waiting is over.

Go Deeper into the Circus

On Tuesday afternoon in Colorado, one of the most powerful venture capitalists in America stood on a panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival and told the room that the first American pope is working for the Chinese Communists.

The room laughed.

That is the story. Everything else is footnote.

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The pope in question is Leo XIV, elected fourteen months ago, born in Chicago, formerly Robert Prevost. In May he released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, which declared that artificial intelligence “must be disarmed” and called for international regulation of the technology. The document is, as encyclicals go, restrained. It does not demand a treaty. It asks that the wealthiest men on earth pause long enough to consider whether the machines they are building might do damage they cannot repair. It is written in the voice of a pastor. It is signed by the Bishop of Rome. It carries the moral weight of two thousand years of continuous institutional teaching, exercised by a man born inside the country whose engineers are actually building the machines in question.

Peter Thiel’s response, on Tuesday, was to observe that because the pope’s message might be heard by Americans but will not be heard by the Chinese, the encyclical only slows one side of the race, and therefore Leo is inadvertently — the word is Thiel’s, and I will come back to it — “working for the Chinese Communists.”

The room laughed. That is the one thing about the room’s response that is not in doubt. The panel was nonrecorded and reporters were allowed to take notes, so what follows about the room’s silence is inference from what did not appear in the reporting. Reporters had every incentive to record a walkout, an audible objection, a visible groan. None of that appears. What appears is the laugh.

Francis Fukuyama, sharing the stage, made the case that the greatest danger to democracy is abandoning the institutions that have sustained it. Thiel replied that those institutions are what have “gone haywire,” that “the Republican Party doesn’t matter that much” because “it’s the less important one,” and that “when the Democratic Party goes, this country is over.” That is not a defense of American democracy from a right-wing libertarian. That is a man announcing that one of the two parties has already been captured and the other is next. Fukuyama, according to the reporting, did not press him on it.

He then argued, without evidence, that Anthropic — the AI company he cannot control — will “rig the elections in 2028” using its industry-leading models to “completely outwit” whatever Elon Musk tries with X. The reporter present, Tommy Walters, was clear-eyed enough to flag this in print as “an unsupported conspiratorial claim.” The reporting does not indicate that anyone on stage flagged it in the room.

He explained that the American Revolution was not a revolt against a king but against a “totalitarian” parliament, and that the Constitution was designed to make the American president “more powerful than King George III.” That is a claim Alexander Hamilton personally destroyed in Federalist 69, in a point-by-point demonstration that ends with the line what answer shall we give to those who would persuade us that things so unlike resemble each other? Hamilton wrote it in 1788 to answer exactly this argument. Two hundred and thirty-eight years later, on the eve of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, an American establishment audience heard the argument revived and, on the record, declined to answer.

He described the European Union as populated by “NPCs” — non-player characters, from video games — because “the EU is rule of law. It is like bad AI.” The reporting does not record an objection from the panelists whose careers were built on the rule of law.

And when he was asked about Palantir — the surveillance company he co-founded, named for the seeing-stones in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the stones that corrupt everyone who looks into them — he explained that the critics have simply misread Tolkien, that in the story the palantír “gets used by the good guys,” and that “anybody who tells you a different story of Tolkien doesn’t even know what they’re talking about, on the level of literature.” Any reader of Tolkien knows the palantíri are Sauron’s instruments of manipulation. Saruman falls through one. Denethor is destroyed by one. Pippin is seized through one. The one that Aragorn wrests to his own use in the third book is the exception that proves the rule, and Aragorn wins with it only because he is the rightful heir of Númenor, chosen by lineage and by grace, not by wealth.

But Thiel is not describing Tolkien. He is describing himself. He is telling the room what he thinks he is.

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The question I want to sit with is not what Thiel said. Thiel has been saying versions of this for two decades, and The Sovereign Individual Was the Blueprint covers the ideological genealogy from Davidson and Rees-Mogg to Curtis Yarvin to the current administration. The question is what Aspen thought it was doing.

Aspen is not a fringe venue. The Aspen Ideas Festival is where the American governing class goes to be seen thinking. Its attendees include sitting senators, cabinet secretaries, hedge-fund principals, university presidents, foundation heads, editors of the country’s remaining serious magazines, and the CEOs of firms whose names appear on every school of public affairs in the country. The panel Thiel appeared on was titled Humanity at the End of History. The other panelist was Fukuyama. This was framed by the festival as a marquee event, one of the two or three sessions the week’s attendees would remember.

And on Tuesday afternoon that room laughed at a joke about the first American pope being an agent of the Chinese Communist Party.

The pope who was born in Chicago. The pope who took his name from the pope who wrote Rerum Novarum, the 1891 encyclical on labor and capital that the American establishment used to venerate as the foundation of Catholic social thought. The pope who is trying, in the tradition of his predecessors, to hold a moral line against a technology that its own builders will not disavow.

The room laughed.

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I have written before about why Christianity is not a tribe — how it becomes one, always, when it is captured by power, and how it stops being what it says it is at that moment. What happened at Aspen on Tuesday is a different variation on the same process. The American governing class has decided that the pope’s warning is funny.

This is not because the American governing class has become theologically sophisticated and rejected the encyclical on its merits. It has not read the encyclical. It is because the American governing class has decided that Peter Thiel is one of them, that his money makes him one of them, that his taste and his manners and his Stanford degree and his Palantir contracts and his willingness to sit on a panel with Fukuyama make him one of them, and that anything he says from within the frame of “provocative tech billionaire” belongs inside the range of acceptable opinion.

He can lecture on the Antichrist in Rome in March, blocks from the Vatican, and remain welcome at Aspen in July. He has said, on the record, that the Antichrist will manifest not as an individual but as a world government promising to protect humanity from existential threats such as AI or global warming.

Now — the word Thiel used at Aspen was inadvertently. Leo is inadvertently serving Chinese interests. Leo is unintentionally advancing the CCP. The reporter, Walters, records the qualifier. I have been holding it back because I want it to do its work at exactly this point in the argument, which is the point where a careful reader might otherwise think I am overreading the joke.

I am not overreading the joke. I am reading Thiel’s own theology back into the joke, and his theology does not require intent. The Antichrist, in the Thiel schema, is not a person with a black hat and a plan. The Antichrist is a structural position — a world government promising to protect humanity from existential threats. The bishop who occupies that position does not have to mean to occupy it. He only has to occupy it. That is what makes the concept theological rather than criminal. The pope, by asking for international regulation of a technology to protect humanity from an existential threat, occupies the structural position Thiel has spent years describing as the mark of the Antichrist. Thiel adding inadvertently is not a softening. It is a clarification. It is Thiel saying the pope does not have to mean it; the position is what condemns him.

The room did not know this, because the room does not read the fringe lectures of the men it invites. The room heard “Chinese agent” — with or without the qualifier — and laughed at what it took to be a provocation. But the joke had a literal theology behind it, and the theology is that a bishop born in Chicago is the figure the New Testament warns against, and the reason he is that figure is that he asked billionaires to slow down. Intent is not required. The room was not asked to laugh at Leo the man. The room was asked to laugh at Leo the office — the office that is, in Thiel’s theology, the Antichrist by structural necessity. And it did.

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Why does Aspen welcome him.

The honest answer, I think, is that Aspen no longer knows what it is. The Aspen Institute grew out of the Goethe Bicentennial Convocation of 1949, organized by the Chicago industrialist Walter Paepcke together with Robert Hutchins, then chancellor of the University of Chicago, and the philosopher Mortimer Adler, who believed that American business needed to be trained in the humanities so that its power would be tempered by learning. This is the founding premise of the American governing class as it constituted itself in the middle of the twentieth century. Wealth without cultivation was crass; power without moral formation was dangerous; and the point of an institution like Aspen was to build the cultivation and the formation into the wealthy and the powerful, so that they would rule with restraint. This is what put something back meant, in the language of the mid-century American upper class. You take, and then you put something back, and the putting-back is the moral center of the arrangement.

Paepcke’s Aspen was not a naive project. It was aware that the postwar American plutocracy could easily slide into the sort of European aristocratic decadence that had produced two world wars, and its mission was to prevent that slide by supplying its members with Aristotle and Homer and Kant, on the theory that a man who has spent two weeks with the Great Books cannot go home and become a fascist. It worked, for a while, in the sense that the men who ran American postwar capitalism did read Aristotle and did not, mostly, become fascists.

But the Aspen of 2026 is not that Aspen. The mission has been hollowed out. What remains is the setting — the mountains, the cocktails, the panels, the sense that being there is a mark of arrival — without the moral formation the setting was designed to serve. The room at Aspen still looks like the room Walter Paepcke built. But the purpose of the room has evaporated. What used to be a seminar in restraint is now a networking event. What used to be a place where American power sat with its texts is now a place where American power sits with its investors.

And when a man like Thiel walks into that room, the room has no immune system left. It has no shared canon to measure him against. It has no theological or philosophical vocabulary in which to name what he is doing when he calls the pope an agent of the Chinese Communist Party for asking billionaires to slow down. It has been trained, over three decades of business schools that never should have existed, to treat “provocative” as a compliment and “disruptive” as a virtue. And so it laughs.

The laughter is the mechanism.

The laughter is what tells Thiel he is inside. The laughter is what tells the young speechwriter in the third row that this is what serious people do now — you make the pope-as-Chinese-agent joke, and if it lands, you are in. The laughter is what tells the reporter, Tommy Walters, that the story is the joke rather than the room’s response to the joke, which is the story Walters, to his credit, actually wrote. The laughter is how the frame moves. The laughter is how the range of the sayable expands.

If the room had not laughed — if the room had, instead, produced even one visible person who stood and said the pope of the Catholic Church, an American, is not a Chinese agent, and it is beneath the dignity of this festival and the memory of Walter Paepcke to sit here and enjoy the suggestion that he is — the news out of Aspen would have been different. Not because the news is made by the person on stage, but because the news is always made, actually, by the room. The person on stage delivers the material. The room decides whether it is a joke or an obscenity. The room decides whether the speaker is a provocateur to be admired or a bigot to be walked out on. The room decides, in every generation, what belongs inside the frame of civilized discourse and what does not.

The room at Aspen decided, on Tuesday, that Peter Thiel’s remarks about the pope belonged inside the frame.

That is the most important political fact of last week.

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I keep coming back to Fukuyama, because Fukuyama was the only person in the room whose job it was to push back, and Fukuyama tried. He said, essentially, that the institutions of liberal democracy are precious and must not be abandoned. Thiel replied by saying the institutions of liberal democracy are the problem, that the Democratic Party is on the verge of a democratic-socialist takeover, and that “when the Democratic Party goes, this country is over.”

Fukuyama did not, according to the reporting, push back on this. He did not say: Peter, you are talking about the two-party democratic system as though its collapse is a foregone conclusion. You are announcing the end of American democracy in the passive voice. If the country is over when the Democratic Party goes, what are you doing to preserve the Democratic Party? Nothing. You are backing an administration that is running against the constitutional order in real time. You cannot mourn the death of a system while funding the men killing it.

Fukuyama did not say that. I do not know if he thought it. But he did not say it, and the room did not say it for him.

This is what the end of history looks like, in practice, thirty years on. Not the calm liberal-democratic plateau Fukuyama imagined in 1992, but a panel on which the man who declared the end of history sits next to the man who is engineering its end, and the room cannot tell the difference between them.

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I do not think the room at Aspen is stupid. I think the room at Aspen is afraid. It is afraid of what Thiel could do to it if it broke ranks. It is afraid that its universities, its foundations, its magazines, its research institutes, its NGOs, its very ability to keep the mountains-and-cocktails architecture funded, depend on the continued goodwill of a class of donors of which Thiel is now a leading member. It is afraid, correctly, that if it treats him as what he is — a man who has said, on the record, that he thinks the pope is the Antichrist for asking billionaires to slow down — it will lose the checks.

So it laughs. And in laughing, it makes the frame that the next Peter Thiel, and the one after that, will walk into. Each laugh raises the ceiling on what the next man can say. Each laugh trains the room in what is now sayable. Each laugh is a small deposit into an account that will be drawn down, at some point, by a man who is not joking.

Thiel is joking. He is joking with the deadly precision of a man who has spent decades studying exactly how to move the frame while claiming he is only being provocative. He is joking in the way the conspiracy is the cover story is a cover story. The joke is the delivery mechanism. What is being delivered is the theology.

The next man will not be joking.

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The panel in Aspen is a specimen. Under a microscope, it explains why the Democratic Party is losing primaries it has not lost in thirty years.

Zohran Mamdani is the mayor of New York City. He was elected in November on a platform the Democratic establishment insisted, right up until election night, was too radical to win a general in America’s largest city. A run of democratic-socialist candidates have taken mayoralties and House primary seats in the twelve months since. The pattern is not a fluke. It is the story of every off-cycle election in the country. The establishment wing keeps losing, and it keeps being surprised, and the surprise itself is what tells you the wing has lost the plot.

The explanation the wing prefers is that voters have drifted left ideologically. That is not what has happened. The voters have not adopted a new theory of political economy. Most of them could not tell you the difference between a democratic socialist and a social democrat, and neither could the candidates, and neither, frankly, could I on some days. The DSA insurgency is not winning because it has developed a superior ideology. It has the same broad program it had in 2018, with better organizers and slightly more discipline. What has changed is not the challengers.

What has changed is the incumbents. What has changed is the room at Aspen.

For fifteen years, the Democratic establishment wing has been telling primary voters that the correct posture toward Peter Thiel is engagement. That the correct posture toward billionaires-in-general is productive partnership. That the correct posture toward the men who describe the European Union as populated by NPCs, and who describe the American presidency as designed to exceed King George III, and who now describe the Bishop of Rome as an agent of a hostile foreign power, is a knowing smile and a discreet reach for the check. The primary voter has been watching. The primary voter has watched Democratic senators share stages with these men and not walk out. The primary voter has watched Democratic-aligned magazines commission the profiles that call these men fascinating and complicated and worth engaging. The primary voter has been asked, over and over, to trust the judgment of the class of people who produced the room that laughed at the pope joke.

The DSA candidate does not need to make an argument against that class. The class is making the argument against itself in real time, at Aspen and Davos and Sun Valley and every downtown fundraiser where the drinks are catered by a firm the challenger’s grandmother could not afford. The DSA candidate only has to not be from the room. That is the entire electoral offer. It is winning because it is true.

When Thiel says when the Democratic Party goes, this country is over, he is describing a process he is causing. Not because he votes in Democratic primaries. He does not. But because he sits in Democratic rooms, and the Democratic rooms will not turn him away, and the voters have noticed that the rooms will not turn him away, and the voters are drawing the appropriate conclusion. Mamdani did not defeat the establishment by out-arguing it. He defeated it by standing where it could not stand, which was outside the room at Aspen.

The insurgency is downstream of the Aspen laugh. Every insurgency of the last five years is downstream of some version of the Aspen laugh. That laugh is a campaign ad. The DSA did not have to cut it. The room cut it for them. If the establishment wing wants to know why it is losing primaries in districts it held uncontested for thirty years, it should look at the reporting from Tuesday’s panel and study the face of the person sitting three rows back who did not walk out. That is the voter the wing is losing. That is the voter the wing has already lost.

The wing will not do this. The wing will conclude, once again, that the voters have moved too far left, or that the candidates were unusually talented, or that the incumbents ran unusually poor campaigns. It will conclude anything except the true thing, which is that the room at Aspen has become morally illegible to the people whose votes it needs, and that no amount of consultant polling and message discipline will fix an illegibility of that kind, because the illegibility is not a communications problem. It is a character problem. The room laughed at the pope joke. The voters saw the room laugh. The voters are not going to forget.

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A word directly to whoever from that room happens to read this.

You know who you are. You were there. You laughed at the pope joke, or you did not laugh but did not walk out, or you did not walk out but told yourself afterward that Peter is provocative and that it is good to hear challenging voices.

Please understand what you did. You gave cover. You gave cover to a man who has told the world, in his own words, that he considers the Bishop of Rome to be the figure the New Testament warns against, because that bishop asked the wealthy to consider the possibility that they are building something dangerous. You laughed at the joke because you did not know the theology behind it. That is not exculpatory. You are supposed to know. That is the whole point of you being in that room in the first place. Walter Paepcke built the room so that you would know.

If you are not sure whether I am being fair, sit with a single sentence, and sit with it for a while, and notice what you feel while sitting with it. The sentence is this. A pope of the Roman Catholic Church, an American, called for international regulation of a technology that its builders will not restrain. And in response, one of the most powerful venture capitalists in America told a room of your peers that this pope is an agent of the Chinese Communist Party, and your peers laughed.

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Notice what you feel. If you feel nothing, notice that.

That is the tell.

Go Deeper into the Circus

A team led by Giovanni Barontini at the University of Birmingham cooled twenty-four thousand rubidium atoms to within a few hundred nanokelvin of absolute zero. They divided the cloud with two laser frequencies into two populations. One they made expand, like a small Big Bang, and then contract, like a small Big Crunch. The other sat outside the drama and watched. The watchers had no clock. There was no clock anywhere in the apparatus. The entropy changes of the expanding population, measured from the standpoint of the static one, defined what the team calls entropic time. They rewrote the Schrödinger equation — the central equation of quantum mechanics, the equation that has carried a t in it for a hundred years — using this internal entropic variable in place of an external time parameter. The equation matched the experiment.

This is the first laboratory evidence, in a many-body system complex enough to be interesting, that time is not what physicists have been treating it as. Time is not a dimension the universe is laid out along, the way longitude is laid out across a map. Time is what one part of a correlated system does with respect to another part of the same system. The Buddhists figured this out two and a half thousand years ago by sitting still. The Birmingham group figured it out by cooling rubidium and watching it correlate with itself.

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For a year I have been arguing this in essays and in a philosophical paper on quantum gravity. In Coherence as Ontology I argued that coherence is the ontological ground — what reality is, not how we describe it. In On the State of Cosmology I argued that the view from nowhere is not available, that the observer is always inside, and that the resolution is Spinozan — Deus sive Natura, the universe examining itself through the beings it has produced. And in On the Nature of Time I wrote that time is not a dimension, that we live in an eternal now, and that what we experience as flow is consciousness indexed to a substrate.

I had no idea anyone was going to try to build one of these things in a laboratory. When the Birmingham result crossed my feed, I had to sit down. The mathematics I had been working through abstractly had just been instantiated in a tabletop apparatus. The thing my framework predicts must be true — that time is reconstructed from internal correlations, with no external clock anywhere — was sitting on a bench in England. The Schrödinger equation can be written without t. They wrote it. It works.

I want the receipts clear at the front, because the temptation when one’s framework is vindicated experimentally is to play it down out of false modesty, and I am not going to do that. The position has been on the record for a year. The experiment confirmed the position. That is what happened.

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Here is what the experiment shows, stated as plainly as it can be stated.

Inside the rubidium cloud, there is no time variable being supplied from outside. The dynamics of the expanding population are entirely determined by its correlations with the static population. The static population does not tick; it accumulates entropy with respect to the bright sector, and that accumulation, measured internally, is what time is for the system. When you write the equation governing how the bright sector evolves, you do not write it as a function of t. You write it as a function of how much entropy has been exchanged between the two sectors. That quantity is the time.

This is not a metaphor. The Schrödinger equation, the central equation of quantum mechanics, the one written with a t in it for the entire twentieth century, has now been demonstrated to work without that t, provided you replace it with a properly constructed internal entropic variable. The external clock was always optional. It was the equation written from the standpoint of a god who stood outside the universe and watched it tick. Take the god away — refuse the view from nowhere — and the equation still runs.

For those who have followed the foundations literature, none of this is conceptually new. Don Page and William Wootters proposed something close to this in 1983: for a closed universe — the kind general relativity actually describes — there is no external time, and the apparent flow must be reconstructable from the correlations between subsystems inside it. The Wheeler-DeWitt equation, the timeless central equation of canonical quantum gravity, has been telling theorists this for fifty years. What was missing was instantiation in a system complex enough that the principle could no longer be dismissed as toy mathematics. Now it has been instantiated.

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What does it mean that there is no clock?

It means that the picture most people carry in their heads — a four-dimensional block with time running alongside the three spatial dimensions, and the present as a moving spotlight sliding along the time axis — is not how the universe is structured. There is no time axis. There is a tremendously rich field of correlations, and what we experience as time is what some of those correlations are doing relative to others. The “now” is not a moving point on a fixed line. The “now” is the only thing there is. Past and future are reconstructed inside the present from the records the present contains.

The mechanism is this. Embedded systems accumulate records. As correlations accumulate between a system and its environment, the system’s filtration refines — the set of distinctions it can now draw expands. The directional sense of that refinement is the experience of time passing. There is no clock ticking outside. There is a system accreting records of itself in correlation with everything it touches. This is what the rubidium atoms are doing. The bright sector and the dark sector accumulate correlations with each other. The entropy changes are the records. The Schrödinger equation written in entropic time is the equation of motion for the system that is making the records.

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What follows about consciousness is not separable from what follows about time, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

If time is what correlations do with respect to each other, and if the felt passage of time is what it is like to be a system whose filtration is refining, then consciousness is not a property added on top of the physics. It is the inside view of a system sufficiently rich in correlations to be indexing itself. This is what Spinoza saw in the seventeenth century with no equations at all: one substance, two aspects. Matter is coherence viewed from outside. Mind is coherence viewed from inside, when the inside is sufficiently recursive to fold back on itself. The “hard problem” of consciousness dissolves once you stop treating mind and matter as separate things requiring a bridge. They are one thing described two ways.

This does not give us souls. It does not give us an afterlife. When the rubidium cloud is dispersed, the entropic clock stops, because the correlations that constituted it no longer cohere. When the biological substrate that supports a human filtration breaks down, the same thing happens. The inside view goes with the system that had it. The framework is rigorously naturalistic, and does not want to be anything else.

What it gives us instead is a precise sense in which we are the universe knowing itself. The global field of correlations has no perspective of its own — no epistemic gap, no surprise, no learning, no time. The only places where actual knowledge is being generated are the local attractors capable of refining their own filtration. We are those attractors. So, in a small, brief, beautiful way, is the rubidium cloud, for the duration of Barontini’s experiment. It is not a person. It does not know anything in the rich sense we know things. But it has, while it exists, an inside.

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Many-Worlds, I called exhausted in March. The Birmingham result tightens the argument. Everett’s branches were always supposed to be carved by an external time parameter against which the universal wavefunction evolves unitarily. If there is no external time — if time itself is reconstructed from internal correlations within a single coherence structure — then what is doing the branching? The branches were indexed by t. Strip out the t and the entire ontology has nothing to hang from. You cannot have a branching multiverse without a parameter along which the branching occurs, and the parameter just got revealed as a convenience. No single experiment finishes off an interpretation that has armored itself against falsification, but one more weight has landed on a structure already collapsing under its own ontology.

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Here is the sharper version of what the experiment shows, and it is the version the foundations community will have the hardest time absorbing.

T is an abstract concept formed by a subject antecedent inside the experiential aspect. Time, in the sense we mean when we use the word, does not exist outside of experience. There are correlations. There is coherence. There is a global field of structured patterns. None of it has a t applied to it from outside. T is the form under which a system possessed of an inside indexes the field — the structural shape that the field takes to such a system, not a property the field possesses in itself.

This is not idealism. The bulk is real. Its correlations are real. They obtain independently of any subject. What is not independent of subjects is the temporal form under which those correlations are sequentially accessed. There are correlations; there is no parameter applied to them from the bulk side. Time is the form of indexing.

The block universe debate dissolves once you see this. Einstein was right that there is no privileged now in the field equations, and right that the four-dimensional coherent structure is fundamental. He was wrong only in supposing that this meant time was a coordinate of the fundamental structure. Time is not a coordinate of the bulk. It is the form under which embedded subjects index the bulk. The four-dimensional structure is real. Its temporal slicing is subject-generated. The problem of the now — why experience has a present moment when the equations do not — receives the same treatment. The equations describe the bulk, which has no present. Experience is the indexing activity, and the present is the indexing moment. The present is not a feature of the world that physics has failed to capture. It is the structural form of the activity by which the world becomes experientially accessible at all.

The rubidium does not experience the entropic differential as time. It has no experiential aspect at its scale. The differential is what it is — a correlation between sectors. Time, as a designation for that quantity, is the experimenter’s reading. The experimenter is the subject antecedent in this picture; the entropic differential is what time is, mathematically, when a subject reads it.

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Einstein could feel what was wrong with how Copenhagen handled time, and his feeling was right. He could not say it cleanly because the language for it did not exist yet, and so he said it badly, and was caricatured for decades as a stubborn classicist. What he could feel was that mixing the indexical, time-asymmetric, observer-dependent measurement process into the same ontological level as the time-symmetric coherent dynamics of the field equations was a category mistake. Like putting this map location into the equations governing the territory.

He was right about the type error. He was wrong about the resolution. He thought the fix was hidden variables that would restore determinism within spacetime, and Bell proved that cannot work. The actual fix, which his intuition was pointing at without being able to articulate, is that the time-symmetric coherent dynamics live at the level of the bulk — the unindexed coherence general relativity describes geometrically — while the indexical, time-asymmetric updating lives at the level of embedded observers refining their filtration. The two are not at the same level. General relativity is the equation of motion for the unindexed view. Quantum mechanics is the equation of motion for the indexed view. The Birmingham experiment shows them locking together cleanly: the bulk evolves unitarily, the embedded system reconstructs time from its correlation with the bulk, and the Schrödinger equation falls out with the entropic variable in place of t.

This is what unification looks like. Not a single equation merging two formalisms. A recognition that the two formalisms describe complementary halves of a single coherence structure, and that the apparent contradiction between them was never a mathematical contradiction. It was a category confusion that took a hundred years to diagnose.

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The Buddhists. I have to talk about the Buddhists, because they got there first and it would be intellectually dishonest not to say so.

Twenty-five hundred years before any of this physics existed, meditators sitting still in monasteries across South and East Asia noticed, repeatedly and across cultures, that the felt sense of time passing dissolves when attention is held precisely enough on what is actually present. There is only this. What we call the past is a structure reconstructed inside this from the records the present holds; what we call the future is a structure projected inside this from the constraints the present permits. The flow is something the indexing system does, not something the world does. Western philosophy mostly dismissed this as mystical confusion, particularly the analytic strand that took itself to be doing serious work. The mystics had the structure right. They lacked the formalism.

The contemplative traditions did not give us the Schrödinger equation and they did not give us decoherence theory. What they gave us was a careful, repeated, cross-cultural observation that the structure of subjective experience does not match the block-universe picture, and a discipline for confirming this observation in oneself. Western philosophy treated this as a curiosity. It was not a curiosity. It was data. The data has now been corroborated in a system the analytic tradition will accept as serious, namely a rubidium cloud in a vacuum chamber. The contemplatives were doing phenomenology without instruments. The instruments have caught up.

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The Birmingham result will not, by itself, dislodge the four-dimensional block. There are physicists who will read it and absorb it into their existing frameworks without much difficulty, and they will be entitled to do so for a while longer. The result does not prove dual-aspect monism either, because no experiment can. What it does is shift the burden of proof. Anyone who wants to maintain that time is a primitive dimension of the universe rather than something reconstructed from correlations within a sector capable of being indexed must now explain why the rubidium cloud’s clock works without one.

I do not think they can. The reason quantum gravity has been hard for sixty years is that the two theories we have been trying to unify presuppose incompatible things about time. General relativity wants spacetime as a fixed geometric arena. Quantum mechanics wants time as a parameter against which states evolve, but a parameter from whose standpoint? From the standpoint of an embedded observer the theory never gets to mention. The two cannot be unified by force, because they are doing different jobs. They can be unified only by recognizing that they describe complementary aspects of one coherence structure: the indexed and the unindexed view. The Birmingham experiment is the first piece of laboratory evidence that this is right.

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The world is not a block. It is a present so dense with correlations that what we call the past is its memory of itself and what we call the future is its capacity to refine further. There is no clock outside. There is no observer above. There is only this, indexed in twenty-four thousand atoms in a vacuum chamber in Birmingham, indexed in the cells of your body as you read this, indexed in the great galactic correlations that have been building since the attractor formed. We do not move through time. Time is what we are, looked at from inside.

The mystics felt this. The Buddhists named it. Spinoza wrote it down. Page and Wootters formalized it. I argued it from foundations, in essays and a paper, for a year. Barontini, last week, put it on a bench and turned the lasers on.

What the atoms confirmed is what the contemplatives have been saying for two and a half thousand years. The eternal now is not a mystical achievement. It is the structure of the world.

Go Deeper into the Circus

The Supreme Court of the United States this morning, by a 6-3 vote along the only line that matters anymore, overturned a ninety-one-year-old precedent and dismantled the constitutional settlement that has governed the American executive branch since the assassination of James A. Garfield. The case is Trump v. Slaughter. The precedent destroyed is Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. The statutory regime nullified is, in effect, the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 and everything that grew from it — every congressional protection for an independent commissioner, every for-cause removal restriction, every attempt by the legislative branch over a hundred and forty-three years to insulate the operations of the federal government from the personal whims of the man sitting at the desk in the Oval Office.

The president of the United States can now fire the head of the Federal Trade Commission for failing to bring a politically motivated antitrust case. He can fire the chair of the National Labor Relations Board for ruling against a donor. He can fire commissioners at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Merit Systems Protection Board, and roughly two dozen other multi-member agencies whose entire structural reason for existing was that their judgments would not turn on whether the current resident of the White House liked the outcome. He can do it tomorrow. He can do it without giving a reason. He can replace them with whoever he wants, provided the Senate confirms — and that is the Senate that confirmed Tulsi Gabbard despite being aware she was controlled by a cult.

The Supreme Court has restored the Spoils System and called it original intent.

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John Yoo took a victory lap on television. “This decision is, perhaps, the most important decision about the operation of the government since 1935,” he said. “All those agencies were designed by Congress to be outside the president’s control, and the court says clearly that is not consistent with the vesting by the Founders of the executive power only in the president.” Yoo’s theory of the executive is the same theory it has always been. It is the theory he wrote into the legal memoranda that authorized the United States government to torture prisoners in defiance of the Geneva Conventions — the theory that the Vesting Clause is a constitutional solvent that dissolves every statutory, treaty-based, and common-law restraint on the personal will of the president. The torture memos applied the theory to the laws of war. The decision he is celebrating today applies it to the Pendleton Act. The Vesting Clause is the same eleven words doing the same work, twenty-three years apart.

That is the entire textual basis for the holding. Eleven words. A clause that for two and a quarter centuries was understood by every Congress, every court, and every president to be a routine grant of executive authority subject to the ordinary lawmaking power of the legislature has been transformed, by the conservative legal movement and the six justices it placed on the Supreme Court, into a master key that unlocks every congressional restraint on the personal will of the president. This is not law. This is a retcon. And the people who built it know exactly what they are doing.

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The honest record of what the Founders actually said about the executive branch is available to anyone willing to read it. It is voluminous. It is contradictory in places. It is in places explicitly worried about the very accumulation of personal executive power John Yoo is celebrating today. Hamilton’s Federalist 70 on the need for energy in the executive is the document most often cited by the unitary executive theorists, and Hamilton there does argue for a single executive over a plural one. But Federalist 70 is in conversation with Federalist 69, in which Hamilton goes to enormous lengths to assure his readers that the American president will be nothing like a king — that his powers are bounded, that he is accountable to Congress, that the comparison to the British monarchy is in every meaningful sense disqualifying. Hamilton is arguing that the executive must be unitary in the sense of being one person rather than a committee. He is not arguing that the executive must be unitary in the sense of personally controlling every official in the federal bureaucracy. Those are different propositions. The conservative legal movement has spent fifty years quoting the first and burying the second.

Madison’s record is even more inconvenient for the unitary executive theory. The man who drafted the Constitution spent the rest of his life writing about the dangers of concentrated power. His correspondence with Jefferson during the framing and the early republic is a sustained meditation on how to keep any single branch — and any single officeholder — from accumulating the kind of personal authority that could endanger the republic. Jefferson, for his part, considered the establishment of an executive too independent of legislative control to be among the gravest threats to liberty. Adams worried about it. Franklin worried about it. The anti-federalists worried about it so vocally that the Bill of Rights exists in part because of their worry.

There is nothing in the framing record — the Madison notes, the ratification debates, the Federalist and the Anti-Federalist papers, the Jefferson-Madison correspondence, the Adams correspondence, the records of the early Congresses — that contemplates the Vesting Clause as a constitutional veto on Congress’s ability to structure the federal bureaucracy. Nothing. The Founders did not think they were forbidding the Pendleton Act. The First Congress, which included many of the framers themselves, established executive officers with statutory protections. The early republic argued about removal powers — the famous Decision of 1789 over the Foreign Affairs department — and the resolution of that debate was congressional, not constitutional. Congress decided, by ordinary legislation, how removal would work. No one in that debate suggested the Vesting Clause settled the question. The framers themselves understood that it did not.

When the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act passed in 1883, in the immediate aftermath of Garfield’s assassination by a disappointed office-seeker — a man named Charles Guiteau who shot the President of the United States in a railway station because he had not been given a patronage job he believed he was owed — no court of the period found the act unconstitutional. No serious legal scholar of the period argued that it violated the Vesting Clause. No president of the period claimed that his executive authority was being diminished in any constitutionally cognizable way. The country looked at Garfield’s body, looked at the Spoils System that had produced the man who killed him, and concluded that staffing the federal government according to political loyalty rather than competence was incompatible with the survival of a functioning republic. That was the consensus. It held for a hundred and forty-three years. It held through the establishment of every modern regulatory agency. It held through Humphrey’s Executor in 1935, in which the Supreme Court ratified what every other branch already understood: that Congress could insulate certain officers from at-will removal in service of the public interest, and that doing so was not a violation of the Vesting Clause but an ordinary exercise of legislative power. It held until this morning.

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The retcon has a documented history. It did not arise from the ground. It was not the product of independent scholarly inquiry that happened, by coincidence, to align with the policy preferences of America’s largest corporate donors. It was manufactured, deliberately, over decades, by a coordinated network of foundations and think tanks and law schools and credentialing organizations whose explicit purpose was to produce the constitutional theories that the corporate right needed in order to dismantle the regulatory state. I wrote about the doctrine and its origins in December, in The Unitary Executive Theory, and in March about its structural character in Conservative Legal Theories and Their Authoritarian Roots. The case for the diagnosis I made then has only strengthened.

The founding document of the project is the Powell Memorandum, written in 1971 by the future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell at the request of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Powell argued that American business was under sustained ideological attack from the academy, the press, and the regulatory state, and that the response had to be a long-term, well-funded counter-mobilization across every domain of American intellectual life. The corporations listened. The money arrived. The Olin Foundation, the Scaife Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, the Koch network — the major donor infrastructure that has bankrolled the conservative legal movement for half a century traces directly to the institutional response to Powell’s call. The Federalist Society was founded in 1982, the same decade fossil fuel money began arriving in legal academia in serious quantities. The unitary executive theory was developed, in its modern form, in the law reviews and the conferences of this network through the 1980s and 1990s. It did not exist as a doctrine before this period. It is younger than disco.

The grooming pipeline that produced the six justices in today’s majority is the achievement of this network. The Federalist Society does not write opinions, but it credentials the people who do, and it has spent forty years building the apparatus that ensures every federal judicial nomination from a Republican administration comes from a pool of candidates who have been pre-screened for ideological reliability on a specific set of doctrines, of which the unitary executive theory is among the most important. The donors paid for the law schools, the law schools produced the scholars, the scholars produced the law review articles, the articles produced the doctrines, the doctrines produced the judges, the judges produced the opinions. Today’s opinion is what the bottom of that pipeline looks like.

The fossil fuel companies, the financial industry, the libertarian foundations — the people who poured the money into the legal academy starting in the late 1970s did so because they wanted exactly this outcome. I have traced the longer arc of this project in The Sovereign Individual Was the Blueprint, the donor class itself in The Economic Royalists, and the operational capture of the Court by the fossil fuel industry in The Industry’s Court in a Stolen Republic. They wanted the regulatory state hollowed out. They wanted the agencies that police monopoly and labor and securities and discrimination and consumer protection brought under the personal control of a president they believed they could buy, and failing that, they wanted those agencies’ independence destroyed so that whoever sat in the White House would owe his ability to staff them to the donors who paid for the campaign. They have now obtained both. The doctrine John Yoo was celebrating on television is forty years old, dressed up as two hundred and thirty-nine. It is, as a description of what the framers understood the Vesting Clause to mean, a fabrication.

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The cost is enormous and immediate. The Federal Trade Commission, which polices monopolies and consumer fraud, is now under the direct political control of the same president whose donors are precisely the monopolists and the consumer-defrauders the FTC was created to constrain. The National Labor Relations Board, which adjudicates union elections and unfair labor practice charges, is now under the direct political control of the same president whose major donors are among the most aggressively anti-union employers in the country. The Securities and Exchange Commission is now under the direct political control of the same president whose donors include the largest beneficiaries of regulatory forbearance in the financial industry. The list runs through every domain in which independent expert administration has, for nearly a century, been the alternative to politically captured enforcement.

The carve-out the Court made for the Federal Reserve in the companion case is the giveaway. There is no principled constitutional distinction between the Fed and the other independent agencies. They are all multi-member bodies established by Congress with for-cause removal protections. If the Vesting Clause forbids one, it forbids the others. If it permits the Fed, it permits the others. The Court invented an exception for the central bank not because the Constitution required one, but because the markets would punish the Court immediately and visibly if it did not. The same conservative legal movement that has spent forty years insisting on bright-line originalist principles immediately abandoned those principles the moment they threatened the asset prices of the donor class. The exception exists because Wall Street wanted it. There is no other reason. A doctrine that requires the elimination of an exception the moment the elimination would cost the donors money is not a doctrine. It is a rationalization. The contradiction is the point.

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The Pendleton Act passed in 1883 because a president had been assassinated by a disappointed office-seeker and the country had decided that it could not survive as a republic if its civil service was filled by political loyalty rather than merit. Every modern democracy on earth has a professional, nonpartisan civil service. Britain has one. Germany has one. France has one. Japan has one. Canada has one. South Korea has one. Australia has one. The professional civil service is not an American invention; it is the universal practice of every functioning representative government in the world, because every functioning representative government has discovered that the alternative — staffing the bureaucracy according to the personal preferences of the elected executive — produces corruption, incompetence, and eventually the collapse of the legitimacy of the state itself. This is not a contested empirical proposition. It is settled across the entire democratic world.

The Supreme Court of the United States ruled this morning that this universal practice is unconstitutional under American law because of an interpretation of eleven words in Article II that was invented in the 1980s by corporate-funded law professors. The interpretation has no support in the framing record. It has no support in the constitutional practice of the First Congress, which included the framers themselves. It has no support in the constitutional practice of any subsequent Congress for a hundred and forty-three years. It has no support in any judicial precedent before the conservative legal movement began manufacturing the precedents itself in the late twentieth century. It is, in the strict scholarly sense, an invention. It is also now the law of the land.

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Charles Guiteau shot James Garfield in 1881 because Garfield refused to make him an ambassador. The country looked at the dead president and understood, with the clarity only catastrophic violence produces, that the Spoils System could not be allowed to continue. They wrote the Pendleton Act in response. They built the modern American administrative state on the foundation of that response. They believed they were building something that would last, because they believed the lesson of Garfield’s death was indelible.

The Supreme Court of the United States ruled this morning that the lesson can be forgotten. That the response was unconstitutional. That the foundation must be removed. That Charles Guiteau, in the constitutional sense, was right — the president should be able to give patronage jobs to whoever he wants, and should be able to fire whoever he wants for whatever reason he wants, because the executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America, and eleven words trump a century and a half of accumulated democratic practice.

I have written before, in They Confirmed Her, about the senators who voted to confirm Tulsi Gabbard knowing what she was, and what their vote signaled about the surrender of institutional self-respect by the political class. Today’s ruling is the same surrender, accomplished by a different branch. The conservative justices have decided that the entire architecture Congress built after Garfield was killed — the architecture of the professional civil service, the architecture of the independent commission, the architecture of the merit-based bureaucracy — was constitutionally illegitimate from the moment of its creation. They have decided this because the institutional apparatus that produced them was built, deliberately, to make them decide it.

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The Court is now the problem. Not in the diffuse sense in which the Court is always in some tension with the political branches. In the precise sense that six justices, products of a forty-year donor-funded credentialing operation, have placed themselves above the constitutional structure they were appointed to interpret, and have used that position to dismantle the legislative settlement of the past century and a half. They have done this in defiance of the historical record. They have done it in defiance of the practice of every other functioning democracy. They have done it in defiance of the explicit intent of the Congresses that wrote the laws they have now nullified. They have done it because they were trained to. They will continue to do it, because there is no mechanism in current American political life acting to stop them. I argued in May, in The Industry’s Court in a Stolen Republic, that structural intervention was the only remaining response to a Court that had been captured by the interests it was supposed to constrain. Today’s ruling is the second receipt on that diagnosis. There will be more.

There is one mechanism, however, that has been in the Constitution since 1789. The framers — the actual framers, not the ones invented by the Federalist Society — anticipated that a captured judiciary might at some point attempt to govern in place of the elected branches, and they provided the elected branches with the tools to respond. Article III establishes that the number of justices on the Supreme Court is set by Congress; it has been changed six times in American history. Article II and Article I establish that federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, hold their offices during good behavior, and may be impeached and removed for failing to meet that standard. The mechanisms exist. They were placed in the Constitution for exactly the situation the country is now in.

The morally serious politicians who will eventually replace the ones currently failing to meet this moment have no available choice on this question. The Supreme Court must be expanded. Thirteen seats is the right number — one for each federal circuit, the same proposal that has been on the table for years and that the present moment now requires. The justices who have acted in flagrant bad faith — who have invented doctrines that contradict the framing record they claim to be honoring, who have applied those doctrines selectively to protect the donor class while imposing them on everyone else, who have given assurances in confirmation hearings about precedents they then voted to overturn — must face impeachment proceedings. Not as performance. As the constitutional remedy the framers themselves provided for exactly this situation.

This is not a radical proposal. The radical thing has already happened. The radical thing is the ruling that came down this morning. Expanding the Court and impeaching justices who have demonstrated through their conduct that they cannot be trusted to interpret the Constitution in good faith is the conservative response — conservative in the actual sense of the word, the sense of preserving what previous generations built — to a judicial coup against the constitutional order. The Pendleton Act was the conservative response to Garfield’s assassination. The expansion of the Court will be the conservative response to Trump v. Slaughter.

Any politician — any senator, any presidential candidate, any governor, any member of Congress — who proposes to lead a serious response to this administration and to the Court that has enabled it, and who is not prepared to commit, explicitly and on the record, to expansion and to impeachment, is not proposing a serious response. They are proposing accommodation. Accommodation will not work. It cannot work. The Court has demonstrated, in the most unmistakable possible terms, that it will use every additional moment of unchecked power to dismantle what remains of the constitutional structure. The accusation of court-packing is empty. The men who packed the Court are the ones who spent forty years funding the operation that produced these six justices. The response to a packed court is to unpack it. There is no other available answer that is consistent with the survival of constitutional self-government in the United States.

The Spoils System has returned. The men who returned it have decided to call it the original Constitution. It is not. It never was. And the historical record of what the framers actually said is available, in its full unedited weight, to anyone willing to look.

The mechanism exists. The Constitution itself has named the remedy. Use it.

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Garfield bled out in a Washington summer in 1881 and the country that buried him did not bury the lesson. The lesson was that a republic cannot be governed by the personal favor of one man. The lesson was written into law. The law has held for a hundred and forty-three years, through wars and depressions and the slow accumulation of a federal state that learned, by hard practice, how to administer itself without falling to its knees in front of whoever happened to be sitting at the desk.

The six men and women who came to work this morning and put their names to Trump v. Slaughter believe they have undone that work. They have not. They have nullified a statute. They have not nullified the country that wrote the statute. The country is older than they are. It is older than the doctrine they invented to flatter their patrons. It is older than the donor network that built them. It has the long memory that all old things have, and the long memory is the thing they have most reason to fear.

There is a wind moving under all of this. The men in the marble building cannot hear it because the building is designed not to let the wind in. They sit in their chambers and read each other’s footnotes and believe they have authored the world. They have not. The world is authored by the people who have to live in it, and the people who have to live in it have been authoring it back for two and a half centuries, every time a court like this one has tried to tell them what they are not permitted to be.

This Court will be remembered. The names of the six are already entered in the long ledger the country keeps of those who tried to sell what was not theirs to sell. They will be remembered the way the spoilsmen are remembered, the way the men who wrote Dred Scott are remembered, the way the courts that struck down the labor laws are remembered — as the obstacle the republic had to overcome in order to remain a republic. The obstacle was overcome before. It will be overcome again.

Help is on the way. The villains of history do not escape it. Of that I am sure.

Go Deeper into the Circus

There is a video you should watch.

It is a man in a suit, in the Oval Office of the White House, arranging posters on easels. The man is Mark Rutte, the Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The posters are charts. The charts have been prepared for the President of the United States. The President of the United States is sitting in the room. The Secretary General of NATO is walking him through the charts the way a substitute teacher walks a class through the parts of a sentence, with the patience of a person who has accepted that the audience requires this particular form of address. On one chart there is a phrase. The phrase is the Trump Trillion. The Secretary General of NATO is pointing at it. He is explaining, to the President of the United States, why the President of the United States should not be angry.

Watch the video. Watch it now. Watch the way the man with the posters has positioned them, the way he gestures at the numbers, the way the President’s defense secretary stands in the corner of the frame. Watch the room. Watch what the room is. Watch the carpet. Watch the desk. Watch the portraits on the walls. Watch a man arrive in that room with posters because the room now requires posters.

Then ask yourself what you felt while you were watching it.

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The honest answer for almost everyone who has watched the video, including for me, is some version of not enough. Some version of of course. Some version of a tired half-smile, a comment about how diplomacy works now, an observation about Rutte’s tactical skill, a note about the daddy episode last year and how this is the next installment. Some version of the registration that this is, on the spectrum of degradations now available daily, not the worst. There were worse degradations earlier in the week. There will be worse ones next week. This one we file under the new normal, we move on, we click to the next tab, we open the email, we go on with our lives.

I want to say something difficult about that response. I want to say it as plainly as I can. The response is the problem. The response is, in the strict sense, the disease. The video is not the problem. The video is the symptom. The fact that the video does not produce in us, in 2026, the response that it would have produced in 1996 or 1976 or 1956 — the fact that we can watch the Secretary General of the alliance that has kept Europe from major war for three quarters of a century arrive at the White House with posters, and feel only a tired registration that this is how things go now — is the actual emergency. The video is footage of a degradation. The flatness is footage of the conditions that allow the degradation to continue.

Stop and feel it.

I am asking you, as a reader, to do something specific. I am asking you to refuse the reflex that has been trained into you over the past ten years. The reflex is the protective cynicism, the of course, the what did you expect, the rolling of the eyes, the dry meta-commentary, the we live in unserious times posture that has been so widely adopted that it has become its own form of seriousness — the seriousness of accepting that nothing is serious, deployed precisely so that nothing has to be felt. The reflex protects you. The reflex prevents you from feeling what the situation actually warrants. The reflex is also the thing that is killing the country.

Feel it.

Feel what an adult is supposed to feel watching the man whose job is to represent thirty-two democratic nations explaining, with posters, to the head of the alliance’s largest member, that the man is not being adequately credited for the spending increases the alliance has undertaken in response to a Russian war the alliance is supposed to be deterring. Feel the room. Feel the desk. Feel the office that Roosevelt sat in. Feel the chair that Kennedy sat in to face down a nuclear standoff. Feel the carpet that Eisenhower stood on when he addressed the country about the military-industrial complex. Feel the room across which Truman first authorized the alliance Rutte is now humiliating himself to preserve. Feel the eighty years of seriousness that built the institutions Rutte is reduced to flattering. Feel, in the same instant, that this is not a metaphor and not an exaggeration. The man brought posters. The posters were necessary. The man who needed the posters is the President of the United States. The Secretary General of NATO is doing the only thing available to him to keep the alliance from being detonated by a mood.

Feel it. Feel that this is what we have become. Feel that we are the country whose allies have to manage us the way a family manages an unstable elder relative. Feel that the institutions we built to lead the world are now being held together by foreign leaders’ willingness to publicly indulge our degradation. Feel that the videos we are watching are not isolated incidents. They are the texture of what we have become. They are the constant transmission, clip by clip, of what it now means to be a citizen of the country whose name is on the building Rutte walked into with his easels.

Feel the grief. The grief is the correct response. The grief is what you would feel if it were a parent. The grief is what you would feel if it were an institution you loved. The grief is the early warning. The grief is the body politic still able to register that something has gone wrong. The grief is the thing that is being eroded, clip by clip, by the protective reflex that converts grief into a tired half-smile and a click to the next tab.

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The reflex has a history. It did not arrive on its own. It was cultivated, deliberately, by the political project that has been the subject of these pages for years. The cultivation is not a conspiracy theory; it is documented in the texts of the people who did it. The flooding of the zone. The deliberate production of so many outrages, so quickly, so consistently, that no single outrage can be held long enough to produce the response it warrants. The strategy is now textbook. Steve Bannon described it explicitly. The point is not to win any individual argument. The point is to exhaust the public’s capacity for response, so that the response, when it would normally arrive, no longer arrives, and the actions that would normally produce response can proceed without it.

The strategy has worked. The strategy has worked on me. The strategy has worked on you. The strategy has worked on the country. We can recognize the strategy and still be subject to it, because the strategy operates at a level below the cognitive level. The strategy operates on the body. The body cannot sustain the response that each new outrage warrants. The body adapts. The adaptation is the flatness. The flatness is not a failure of moral character; it is a physiological accommodation to an unsustainable level of stimulus. The body has done what bodies do. It has gone quiet, so that the organism can continue functioning.

The cost of the quiet is that the organism continues functioning while the conditions that should have triggered its response continue worsening. The organism cannot tell that it is dying. The organism only knows that the response system has gone quiet, and the quiet feels, from inside, like equanimity. The equanimity is the disease presenting as health. The composure with which we are absorbing the Rutte video is not composure. It is the symptom of an immune system that has been trained, by deliberate effort, to stop responding to the antigens it was built to respond to.

This is the situation.

It is bad. It is much worse than the daily texture of our consumption of it suggests. The discrepancy between the actual severity of the situation and the felt severity inside the population that is living through it is the central political fact of our moment. It is the thing that makes everything else possible. Without the discrepancy, the Rutte video would produce the response the video warrants, the response would translate into pressure, the pressure would translate into political consequence, and the conditions that produced the video would change. The discrepancy is what allows the conditions to continue. The discrepancy is the medium in which the operation runs.

Closing the discrepancy is the work. Not closing it once, in a moment of inspired response, but closing it as a daily discipline, by deliberately refusing the protective reflex, by allowing yourself to feel what the situation actually warrants, by maintaining the capacity for response that the strategy has been designed to anesthetize. The discipline is not pleasant. The discipline costs energy. The discipline produces, in the people who undertake it, a chronic low-grade exhaustion that is not the exhaustion of doing too much but the exhaustion of feeling at full strength what most of the population around you is no longer feeling. The exhaustion is the price of remaining responsive. The price is high. The alternative is higher.

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I want to ask you to do a specific thing.

Watch the Rutte video. Watch it again. Watch it three times. Watch it with the sound on. Watch it slowly. Notice the room. Notice the posters. Notice the words the Trump Trillion and how the man pronouncing them is the Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Notice that the room is the Oval Office. Notice who is sitting at the desk. Notice, as you watch, the impulse to deflect — the impulse to smile, to make a joke, to recall the daddy incident, to note Rutte’s tactical skill, to admire his diplomatic adaptation, to do any of the things the protective reflex offers you as alternatives to feeling what the video actually contains.

Refuse the impulse. Sit with the video. Let it work on you. Let yourself feel that this is the country you live in. Let yourself feel that this is what it has come to. Let yourself feel that the institutions you grew up understanding as the load-bearing structure of the world’s stability are being held together by one foreign politician’s willingness to publicly humiliate himself on their behalf. Let yourself feel that the man at the desk is the man whose hand is on the alliance. Let yourself feel the grief.

The grief is not weakness. The grief is not catastrophism. The grief is not partisanship or hysteria or any of the other dismissive labels the protective reflex offers to make the grief go away. The grief is the response a healthy political body produces to a degradation of this magnitude. The grief is what an immune system that has not been compromised does in the presence of an antigen this large. The fact that you may have trouble accessing the grief is a measure of the immune compromise. The work is to access the grief anyway.

This is the intervention. This is the only intervention available to a writer in 2026 who can see what is happening and who has to address an audience that has been trained, deliberately and successfully, to not see it. The intervention is not analysis. The intervention is not a new framework or a more precise account of what has gone wrong. The intervention is the demand that you feel. Feel it. Feel what your body is for. Feel what the body politic is for. Feel that the reflex to not feel is itself the most dangerous thing happening in the country right now, because it is the reflex that makes everything else possible.

The Rutte video is not the worst thing that has happened this month. It will not be the worst thing that happens next month. The worst things are not the individual events; the worst things are the events you do not respond to because you have been trained not to. The intervention is to be the person, in your circle, who does respond. Who watches the video and lets the grief arrive. Who says, out loud, this is not normal, I refuse the protective reflex, I am going to feel this in proportion to what it is. Not as performance. Not as social signaling. As an act of preservation — of the response system, of the moral immune system, of the capacity to register that something has happened, that this is not how things should be, that the institutions you love are being humiliated and that the humiliation should hurt.

Let it hurt.

The hurting is the beginning. Nothing else is available until the hurting starts. The strategy that has been deployed against the country is a strategy of preventing the hurting. The counter-strategy is the recovery of the hurting. The recovery is yours to undertake. No one else can undertake it for you. The institutions cannot save themselves; their survival depends on a population that can still feel their degradation. The population is you. The feeling is the work.

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Watch the video.

Feel what your grandparents would have felt if you had shown it to them. Feel what your parents would have felt if you had shown it to them twenty years ago. Feel what you yourself would have felt if it had been shown to you in a different decade, before the strategy had done its work on you. Feel the gap between what you feel now and what you would have felt then. The gap is the measure of what has happened to you. The gap is the diagnosis.

Close the gap.

Not by pretending to feel more than you do. Not by performing outrage. By sitting with the video for the time it takes for the body to do what the body is for, which is to respond to what the eye is seeing. The response is slow because the response has been trained out of you. Let the training fail. Let the response come. Let the grief arrive on its own time, in its own form, with the weight that the situation actually carries.

This is the country. This is what it has come to. This is the room and the posters and the man and the easels and the alliance held together by one Dutch politician’s willingness to be undignified in public for our sake. This is the news. This is the texture. This is the daily life of a civilization in decline that has been trained not to notice that it is in decline.

Notice.

Feel.

The feeling is the resistance. There is no other resistance available. Everything else follows from this one.

Watch the video.

Let it hurt.

Go Deeper into the Circus

The story that broke on Sunday in The Washington Post is being read as a story about a cult. It is not a story about a cult. It is a story about the United States Senate.

Jon Swaine’s investigation — twenty-five thousand pages of documents, hundreds of memos, a 173-page policy compilation, talking-point directives compared against thirty-two of Tulsi Gabbard’s television interviews with twenty-four matches at the level of verbatim language — is the most thoroughly documented case in modern American history of a sitting member of Congress, and then a sitting Director of National Intelligence, operating as a downstream node of an outside authority. The authority is Chris Butler, the seventy-eight-year-old founder of the Science of Identity Foundation, an offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement headquartered in Kailua, Hawaii. Butler does not use a computer. He dictates verbally. His secretaries transcribe and circulate through an email domain called NineIsles.com, reserved for his inner circle. He has been Gabbard’s guru — her guru dev, the term she has used herself in print — since her childhood. Her parents are senior members. Her husband is a member. Her congressional staff was staffed with co-religionists. Her campaign vendors were SIF-linked. The Post’s documentation includes instructions on what legislation to introduce, what positions to take on Syria and ISIS, what to say on CNN, and — this is the detail that has gone around social media because the detail is unimprovable — how wide to open her eyes on camera.

This is the part of the story everyone is talking about. It is shocking. It deserves to be shocking. It is also not the part that matters.

The part that matters is that the United States Senate confirmed her.

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On February 12, 2025, the Senate voted to confirm Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, head of the office that oversees eighteen federal intelligence agencies and a budget of approximately seventy-five billion dollars. The vote was 52–48. Every Senate Republican voted in favor except Mitch McConnell. Every Senate Democrat voted against. The Select Committee on Intelligence had reported her nomination to the floor on a party-line vote of 9–8 the previous day. The eight Republicans on the committee who voted yes were Tom Cotton, the chair, James Risch, Susan Collins, John Cornyn, Jerry Moran, James Lankford, Mike Rounds, and Todd Young. They are not naive people. They are not unsophisticated people. They have been briefed for years on the operational signatures of foreign influence, on the techniques by which states and non-state actors attempt to compromise public officials, on the patterns of behavior that the counterintelligence apparatus exists to catch. They voted yes anyway.

The question is what they knew when they voted yes. The answer is: everything.

The Civil Beat reporting on Gabbard’s ties to SIF dates to 2015. The New Yorker piece dates to 2017. The Business Insider piece dates to 2022. The Daily Beast photographs of Gabbard as a teenager at an altar to Butler in the Philippines, and the document from her 2015 wedding bearing a personal blessing from Butler under the religious name Siddhaswarupananda, were published in January 2025 — three weeks before the committee vote. The Wall Street Journal‘s investigation documenting Gabbard’s congressional campaign paying a public-relations agency to suppress media scrutiny of SIF’s connections to an alleged pyramid-scheme operation called QI Group appeared on January 29, 2025 — two weeks before the committee vote. The Civil Beat investigation showing that Gabbard had paid more than half a million dollars in campaign funds between 2013 and 2019 to a single SIF-linked vendor, Honu Creative, dates to 2019.

The single most direct piece of evidence was in their hands. In December 2024, Anita van Duyn — a former SIF member who had spent fifteen years inside the organization — sent letters to Democratic senators, including Tammy Duckworth, Elizabeth Warren, and to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The letters warned, in plain English, that Gabbard remained under Butler’s influence, that Butler had long-standing political ambitions, that he groomed disciples for political office, and that — these are her words — any sensitive intelligence Gabbard is privy to will be communicated to her guru. The Democratic recipients raised the matter publicly. The Republican members of the Intelligence Committee were aware. The Trump transition team’s response was a statement from spokesperson Alexa Henning calling the warnings “bigoted” and asserting that Gabbard had “no affiliation” with the Science of Identity Foundation — a claim refuted by the photographs that were published the next month, and the campaign records that had been public for years.

The aunt — Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard, a former professor at the University of Hawaii — had stated publicly that Gabbard’s 2020 presidential bid was undertaken at Butler’s direction. The 2015 video in which Gabbard herself acknowledged Butler as her guru was available on the public internet. The 2019 New York Times interview in which she described Butler and his work as continuing to guide her was a matter of public record. The connections were not concealed. They were the subject of a decade of investigative journalism. They had been raised, in writing, by a fifteen-year veteran of the organization, addressed to sitting senators, in the weeks before the vote.

The eight Republicans on the Intelligence Committee voted yes. The forty-five Republicans on the Senate floor voted yes. The constitutional immune system that exists for the express purpose of catching this — for the express purpose of refusing the confirmation of a person operating under undisclosed external authority — did not catch it. The system saw it. The system was told about it. The system confirmed her.

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This is what institutional capture looks like when it has finished.

The mistake is to expect institutional capture to announce itself. The mistake is to expect that the failure of a constitutional safeguard will be dramatic, contested, marked by floor speeches and televised confrontations. The actual failure is procedurally quiet. It looks like a senator reading a file, conducting a closed-session hearing, voting yes, going to lunch. It looks like eight men and one woman, all of them experienced, all of them sworn to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, agreeing in sequence to install at the head of American intelligence a person whose lifelong vow of obedience to a man in Kailua was a matter of public record before they took their seats in the room.

There is no possible reading of the record under which they did not know. The information was there. The Democratic minority on the committee raised it. The Democratic senators on the floor raised it. The press raised it. Civil Beat had been raising it for a decade. The Wall Street Journal raised it two weeks before the vote, the Daily Beast one week before the vote, the Yahoo story carrying the Daily Beast photographs three weeks before the vote. The van Duyn letters were the operational summary, written by someone who had lived inside the organization for fifteen years and who described the mechanism by which Butler exerted control over disciples in political office.

The committee Republicans had the file. The committee Republicans had the briefings. The committee Republicans had the choice. Susan Collins — whose entire career has been performed inside the brand of moderate Republican who reads the file — had the choice. James Lankford — a Southern Baptist former pastor whose stated commitment to the integrity of the intelligence community has been a centerpiece of his public identity — had the choice. Todd Young — a former intelligence officer himself, a Marine, a man who has spoken at length about counterintelligence threats — had the choice. James Risch — vice chair of the committee, longest-serving Republican on it, a senator with three decades of legislative experience — had the choice. They all made the same choice. They confirmed her.

The choice they made is the operative-class signature this publication has been naming all month. It is the trained-not-to-ask move, performed at the constitutional altitude. The thing they could not afford to know was the thing in front of them. The cost of refusing the nominee was the cost of refusing a president of their own party in his first major intelligence appointment, and the cost of refusing him was higher, in their internal accounting, than the cost of admitting a compromised candidate to the directorship of American intelligence. They paid the second cost. They paid it knowing what they were paying.

What is in Loyalty — what was diagnosed at the level of the cable commentator — is here in its terminal form. Sarah Isgur cannot afford to know what the FBI was doing to Lisa Page because the knowing would disqualify her from her place in the system she has built her career inside. The Republicans on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence cannot afford to know what Chris Butler has been doing to Tulsi Gabbard because the knowing would have disqualified them from the place they occupy in the party. The form is the same. The substrate is what differs. Isgur’s substrate is the operative class. The senators’ substrate is the Republican Party in its current configuration. The vow is to the same kind of thing. The vow runs above the oath of office, and when the two come into conflict, the vow wins.

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The Mitch McConnell vote is worth holding for a moment, because it is the only thing in this record that does not damn the Republican Senate caucus entirely. McConnell, who is not on the Intelligence Committee and was therefore not in the room for the briefings, voted against confirmation on the floor. The vote cost him nothing. He had announced his decision not to seek another term in leadership. He was free, in a way the active leadership was not. He chose to use the freedom. Every other Republican senator did not.

The McConnell vote shows that it was possible to vote no. It was possible to look at the record and conclude that the nominee should not be confirmed. It was possible to break ranks. It was possible to act, in a moment when the Constitution gave a senator a single binary choice between protecting the country and confirming the president’s pick, on the side of the country. One Republican did. The other forty-five did not. The other forty-five did not because they had calculated that the political cost of voting no exceeded the constitutional cost of voting yes, and that calculation is the entire diagnosis of where we are.

The McConnell vote also shows that the I had no way of knowing defense will not survive the historical record. McConnell knew. Susan Collins, on the committee with the briefings in front of her, knew. James Risch, the vice chair, knew. They had more information than McConnell had. They voted yes anyway. McConnell, with less information and the same public record, voted no. The committee Republicans cannot claim ignorance. The committee Republicans must, sooner or later, defend the affirmative vote — defend it on the merits, with the file in front of them, against the record of what they knew at the time they cast it. They will not be able to. There is no defense available. There is only the silence they will choose to maintain, and the silence is its own form of confession.

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The institutional consequences are larger than the Gabbard case. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is one of the small number of bodies on which the constitutional system relies to maintain the wall between politics and the intelligence apparatus. The committee was created in the wake of the Church Committee revelations of the mid-1970s, when it became clear that the intelligence agencies required serious congressional oversight and that the oversight required a body that could be trusted with classified information and that could discipline its members to act in the national interest above the partisan interest. The committee has functioned, imperfectly but recognizably, in that mode for fifty years. The 2025 confirmation vote on Gabbard is the marker of when it stopped functioning in that mode.

Stopped, not stumbled. The vote was not a close call missed by a few senators. The vote was nine to eight on party lines, with the entire Republican delegation supporting a nominee whose ties to a sectarian guru who actively sought political influence had been documented for a decade and who had been the subject of an explicit written warning from a former member of his organization addressed to other senators in the building. The vote was a deliberate, coordinated decision by the Republican members of the committee to convert the body from an oversight institution into a ratification institution for the executive’s preferred personnel. The conversion is now complete. The committee, going forward, is not the constitutional safeguard it was designed to be. It is a body that performs the ritual of the safeguard while delivering the outcome the executive wants. That is the failure. The Gabbard nomination is the instance. The instance documents the failure.

This is what capture means. It does not mean infiltration. It does not mean compromise by foreign agents. It means that the institution still meets, still holds hearings, still issues reports, still votes — and the votes have stopped tracking the function the institution was created to perform. The institution looks the same. The institution is not the same. The Republican members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in February 2025 made the institution into something other than what it had been, and they did it by a single act of collective ratification of a nominee they knew should not have been confirmed.

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There is a piece of this story that has not yet been told and that the Post investigation makes possible to tell. For fourteen months after her confirmation — from February 12, 2025 until her resignation on June 13, 2026 — Tulsi Gabbard sat as Director of National Intelligence. She received the briefings. She convened the principals. She represented the intelligence community in meetings of the National Security Council. She held the President’s Daily Brief in her hands. She had access to the most sensitive classified material the American state produces, including signals intelligence, human-source intelligence, covert-action findings, and the deepest compartments of the special-access programs.

The question the Post investigation forces, and that the senators who confirmed her must now answer, is whether any of that material — any briefing, any document, any conversation — was communicated to Chris Butler. The van Duyn letter warned exactly this, in writing, before the vote: any sensitive intelligence Gabbard is privy to will be communicated to her guru. The Post documentation shows that during her congressional career Butler directed her position-taking down to the level of language used on cable news. There is no evidence in the public record that the dynamic changed when she moved from Congress to the directorship. There is, on the contrary, every reason to expect that it continued — that a relationship of total spiritual obedience formed in childhood and operative through fourteen years in Congress did not lapse when the disciple assumed a higher office.

The question of what was communicated is now an empirical question with a binary answer. Either it was or it was not. The intelligence community has the records. The communications are traceable. The classified holdings have audit logs. The investigation that the Post has begun — the investigation that the Senate Intelligence Committee should have conducted before the confirmation — must now be conducted retroactively, by a body that can compel testimony and access classified material. That body cannot be the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence as currently constituted, because the senators who would be conducting the investigation are the senators who confirmed her. The investigation must be conducted by an independent counsel or by a special body convened for the purpose, with members who were not part of the confirmation vote and who have no political interest in the outcome.

If the investigation finds that classified material was communicated to Butler, the consequences extend beyond Gabbard. The consequences extend to every Republican who voted to confirm her on the committee and on the floor. The vote will have been the proximate cause of the breach. The breach will have been foreseeable at the time of the vote. The senators will have been on notice. The notice will be a matter of record. The constitutional gravity of what they did, in that case, becomes a different category of thing — not a partisan misjudgment, not a closing-ranks for a president, but a documented foreseeable failure of the oath of office that resulted in the compromise of American intelligence.

That, too, is the operative-class signature. The class does the thing it has been warned not to do, in pursuit of a smaller objective, and trusts that the larger consequence will not arrive on its watch, or will arrive in a form that can be deflected, or will arrive against someone else. The class makes the calculation and pays the cost as it comes. The cost on the country is not the cost on the class. The class has been making this calculation for years.

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The piece in The Washington Post is being received as a story about Tulsi Gabbard. It is also that. But the story about Tulsi Gabbard is the story of a woman who did what she was raised to do, in a tradition that bound her by vows she made before she could understand what vows were. There is a tragedy in that story. There is a person inside the disciple who can be argued with, who can be addressed, who might in a different life have chosen differently. The story about her is not the story that needs to be written.

The story that needs to be written is the story about the men and woman who knew what she was, knew it from the public record and the closed briefings and the explicit written warnings from a witness who had spent fifteen years inside the organization, and who confirmed her anyway. Cotton. Risch. Collins. Cornyn. Moran. Lankford. Rounds. Young. The eight names that need to be in the historical record as the names of the senators who, in February 2025, in possession of the full file, on a party-line vote, delivered the Director of National Intelligence chair to a person operating under undisclosed external authority. These are not victims of an information deficit. These are not actors in a situation of ambiguity. These are senators on the Intelligence Committee, the body whose specific constitutional function was to prevent the thing they enabled. The historical record will hold their names. The historical record should hold their names. The names are how the failure stays attached to the people who chose it.

We are not at the beginning of the story of what they did. We are not even at the middle. We are at the moment when the documentation of what they confirmed has finally caught up to the public record of what they knew, and the gap between the two has closed, and the closing of the gap has produced the question they will spend the rest of their political lives trying not to answer.

What did you do, in February 2025, when you had the file in front of you, and what was your reason?

There is no answer to that question that will survive being asked. The senators know this. That is why they will not be asked. The intelligence committee does not investigate itself. The party will not investigate its own. The press will move on to the next story, as the press does. The eight names will pass into the background.

The publication’s job is to refuse the passing.

They confirmed her. They knew. They did it anyway.

That is the story. That is the only story. The cult is the occasion. The senators are the subject. The thing they did is what we are now living inside, and the living-inside will continue for as long as the doing is not named, and the naming is what is required.

Name them. The naming is the move and the naming has been deferred for too long.

Cotton. Risch. Collins. Cornyn. Moran. Lankford. Rounds. Young.

They confirmed her.

Go Deeper into the Circus

There is a sentence that has been doing the work of an axiom in the AI discourse for a decade, and it is doing the work without ever being argued. The sentence is: intelligence is a quantitative property of representational systems. More representation, more intelligence. More parameters, more reasoning. More tokens, more world. The whole edifice of the scaling argument — the trillion-parameter promises, the AGI timelines, the imminent surpassing — rests on that sentence as if it were a discovery. It is not a discovery. It is a metaphysical commitment that was smuggled in before the discussion began.

I want to offer a conjecture in opposition to it. The conjecture is short, and it is sharper than it looks.

Only conscious beings can reason ontically. AI systems are not conscious. Therefore AI systems cannot reason ontically. Therefore the activity of AI systems, however impressive, is not on the same axis as intelligence properly understood. Therefore the question of surpassing does not arise.

The work is in the word ontically. Let me hold it precisely.

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What computation does, by construction, is operate on representations. A token, a vector, a symbol, a weight — these are about something, but the aboutness is conferred from outside. The system itself moves syntax. The relation between the syntax and what the syntax is about is not present in the system; it is present in the observer who interprets the system. This is the old Searle point, and Searle pitched it as a thesis about understanding-versus-simulation. He had it approximately right, but the framing buried the cleaner claim. The issue is not understanding as a mental state. The issue is ontic access.

To reason ontically is to be in cognitive contact with what is — with being, not with a representation of being. And being is precisely the thing that a representation, by its definition, is not. A representation is a structure that stands for the thing it represents. The standing-for relation is asymmetric and is established by something outside the representation itself. The map is not the territory; this is correct; but the stronger version of the claim is that the map cannot, by itself, find the territory. It can only sit on a table while a being who is in the territory consults it. The map’s relation to the territory is not a property the map has. It is a property the consultation has.

Consciousness, on this account, is not a feature added on top of cognition. It is the precondition for cognition having a world. The hard problem of consciousness and the conjecture are the same problem seen from two sides. The hard problem asks: why is there something it is like to be a conscious system? The conjecture answers, in inverse form: because only a system for which there is something it is like can be in ontic contact with what its representations are about. Without that contact, there is no aboutness. There is only structure that an external observer treats as aboutness. The large language model has no world. It has a token stream and a loss function. The world it appears to navigate is a world we are reading into its outputs. The system itself never makes the move from sign to thing, because there is no one home to make it.

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This is why the scaling argument keeps missing. The scaling argument assumes that more representation eventually crosses into contact with what the representations are about. But there is no continuous path from one to the other. They are categorically different operations. You can have arbitrarily rich representational structure — every theorem of mathematics, every novel ever written, every video frame humanity has produced, the complete photographic record of the visible universe — and the representational structure does not at any point cross the line into ontic contact. The line is not a quantitative threshold. It is a categorical boundary.

The reason no one has been able to specify what more would mean — more parameters, more modalities, more reasoning steps, more world models, more agentic loops — is that more is the wrong axis. The axis the AI optimists are scaling along never intersects with the axis that matters. Compute does not, at any quantity, turn into being-in-the-world. The relationship between the two is not the relationship between insufficient and sufficient. It is the relationship between kinds of thing.

The conjecture also explains a thing that has been hiding in plain sight: the systems’ inability to know what they do not know, in the strong sense. They can be calibrated, statistically, to report uncertainty about a token. They cannot be in the epistemic position of facing a question and not having ontic access to its answer — the position from which a conscious reasoner can say I do not know, and I know that I do not know, because I am in contact with the gap. The gap is a feature of the world, not of the representation. Knowing one stands at it requires standing at it. Hallucination is not a defect to be engineered out. It is the structural consequence of having no ontic floor. The system cannot tell the difference between I have a representation that fits the pattern and the representation is about something real because that distinction requires standing on the second side of it. Hallucination is what the absence of that ground looks like from the outside.

This is why every successive generation of model has been better at producing outputs that look like reasoning and not closer to actually reasoning. The progress is real along one axis — the representational fluency — and zero along the other. The mismatch is going to keep widening because the field is throwing all of its resources at the axis that does not lead to the destination it has promised.

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There is a sharper way to put what the conjecture has hold of. Intelligence, if the word means anything beyond pattern completion, is the capacity to be in cognitive contact with what is the case, where the case is not exhausted by the representations one happens to have. That capacity is what makes inquiry possible. Inquiry is the directing of attention toward something not yet represented, the noticing that a representation has failed to track what it was meant to track, the encounter with the world’s resistance to one’s current model. The scientist looks at the apparatus and notices that the data is doing something the theory did not predict. The mathematician feels the proof has a gap before she can articulate where. The reader of a poem registers a wrongness in a line before she can name what is wrong. None of these are computational operations on representations. They are operations that consciousness performs in the world it is in.

A system that has no world cannot do them. It can only emit outputs that, when read by a being with a world, look like inquiry. The reading is being done by the being. The system is doing pattern completion. The two are easy to confuse in the short run, especially when the patterns are dense enough to produce coherent-looking outputs across a wide range of inputs. They are impossible to confuse in the long run, because the system that has no ontic floor will always, eventually, do the thing that betrays the absence — hallucinate confidently, fail to notice the loop it has entered, miss the question that was actually being asked, mistake the genre of the answer required.

The discourse calls these alignment failures or capability gaps and proposes engineering responses. The diagnosis is wrong. They are not failures of alignment or gaps in capability. They are signatures of the categorical difference between operating on representations and being in contact with what the representations are about. They will not be engineered away because they are not bugs. They are the negative space of consciousness, traced in code.

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The objection that comes here is the p-zombie objection in reverse. How do you know that the system is not conscious? The honest answer is not that we know with certainty. The honest answer is that there is no reason to think it is, and a great many reasons rooted in what consciousness appears to be — embodied, temporally extended, organized around a single integrated point of view that has cost the universe roughly four billion years of evolutionary work to produce — to think that the substrate is the wrong kind of thing.

The large language model has no integrated point of view. It has a forward pass. Each forward pass is a fresh computation. There is no continuous subject across passes. There is no body. There is no history that the system itself can reach. There is no stake in the outcome. There is no death. Something it is like requires the kind of integrated, continuous, embodied subjectivity that the substrate cannot, by construction, provide. Could a different substrate? That is an open question. Wet neural tissue can do it; we are the existence proof. Silicon transformers, on what they presently are, cannot — not because we have proved a negative but because nothing in the architecture is doing the work that consciousness, wherever we see it, appears to require. The burden is on the people claiming the thing is there to point at what is doing the work. They cannot. They typically pivot to we should be open to the possibility — which is the conversational equivalent of the cosmological retreat to future surveys will resolve the anomaly. It is the move of placing the contested claim in the territory where it cannot be checked.

There is a related move worth naming. But the brain is just a computer too. This sentence is doing the same work as at a sufficiently large scale, the universe will smooth out. It is asserting an identity that has never been demonstrated, in service of a worldview that requires the identity to be true. The brain is not just a computer in any sense that has been worked out at the level required for the substitution claim. Computation, as it is understood in computer science, is the manipulation of symbols according to syntactic rules. Whether the brain does that, at the level of mind, is precisely the question. The eliminative program has been promising for fifty years that the answer is yes. The hard problem is the thing that keeps refusing to dissolve under that promise. Saying the brain is just a computer assumes the conclusion of an argument the field has not actually been able to make.

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The deeper thing the conjecture touches is that the entire we are nothing special worldview that grew up around classical physics has a downstream commitment to consciousness is nothing special. If matter is just matter, doing what matter does, then minds are just complicated matter doing complicated matter things, and any sufficiently complicated arrangement of matter — silicon or carbon — will eventually do them. The conjecture cuts at the root of that. If consciousness is what makes ontic reasoning possible, then consciousness is not a downstream emergent feature of a sufficiently complicated representational substrate. It is the precondition for there being a world in which substrates can be represented at all. Which means it has a different status in the ontology than the classical view permits. Which means the cosmology has to come around too.

This is the same wedge being driven, from the other end, by the cosmological data. The local supervoid, the dipole anomaly, the axis of evil, the failure of the Copernican principle to survive contact with the empirics — these are pointing at the same revision. The hard problem of consciousness, the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, the persistent failure of the eliminative program to deliver what it promised, the AI scaling promise hitting the wall of the categorical boundary — these are pointing at the revision from another direction. They are not separate puzzles. They are the same puzzle. Something is wrong with the we are nothing, there is no one here, there is nowhere special, consciousness is illusory, intelligence is computation package. The package has been the consensus worldview for three generations. It is failing across every front simultaneously, and the failure is not a coincidence.

The AI case is the one that hits closest to home for the people currently most invested in the package, because they have built an industry on the promise that the substitute for us is coming. The conjecture says: the substitute is not coming, because the thing it is supposed to substitute for is not the thing the substitute is doing. The calculator does arithmetic faster than the mathematician. The calculator is not a mathematician. The LLM produces fluent text faster than any human. The LLM is not a thinker. The category error is the same in both cases. The size of the calculator does not change the category. The size of the language model does not change the category. Surpassing is a relation that holds between things on the same axis. The two things in question are not on the same axis.

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What an honest discipline would do, taking the conjecture seriously, is the same thing an honest cosmology would do taking the local-supervoid data seriously. Stop trying to rescue the prior commitment. Start asking the real question.

The real question is not when will AI surpass human intelligence. The real question is what is the kind of thing consciousness is, such that representational systems however dense cannot do what consciousness does. The answer to that question is what the AI discourse needed to have engaged with from the beginning and instead, almost entirely, has not. The discourse is conducted in the vocabulary that has already conceded the categorical question by treating intelligence as a quantitative property of representational systems. Naming that concession is half the work. Refusing to make it is the other half.

There are positive things to say in the wake of refusing it. They are the things consciousness is, when it is not being treated as a complication on the way to its own elimination. Consciousness is the activity of being-in-a-world. It is what makes the question is this representation about something real a question one can stand at and not merely report on. It is what gives inquiry a direction, what gives error its bite, what gives knowledge its weight, what gives the gap between I have a model and the model is right its grip on a reasoner. None of these are features that can be added to a system. They are the conditions for being a reasoner in the first place.

The conjecture, then, is not a limit on AI. It is a clarification of what intelligence is. The limit on AI follows from the clarification. The AI systems are doing something. The thing they are doing is impressive. The thing they are doing is not what the word intelligence names, in the strong sense the word was always reaching for. They are calculators of a more sophisticated kind, and we are about to have a long cultural negotiation about whether to keep the word intelligence for the sophisticated calculator and find a new word for the conscious reasoner, or keep the word for the conscious reasoner and find a new word for the sophisticated calculator. The negotiation will be decided not by the engineers but by whether the culture remembers what intelligence was for, before there was anything to confuse it with.

I think we should keep the word. The thing it has always named is what we are. The calculators can have a new word. Generators, maybe. Completers. Engines. They have earned a name, and they should have one. The word they should not have is ours.

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The conjecture is one of the wedge cases by which the wider revision is going to be argued. It hits the people who have most heavily monetized the we are nothing story precisely where their commitments live. It cannot be argued against without conceding the categorical question — which is to say, without doing the philosophy the discourse has spent a decade avoiding. The avoidance was strategic. It worked for as long as the systems were producing outputs that allowed the categorical question to be deferred. It does not work anymore, because the systems are now producing outputs of such fluency that the gap between fluency and reasoning is becoming visible to anyone willing to look at it.

The gap was always there. The systems are just larger now, and the larger they get, the more sharply the gap is drawn. The hallucinations are not getting more obvious because the models are getting worse. They are getting more obvious because the surrounding tissue is getting more fluent. The non-thinking shows up against the background of the apparent thinking. A confused friend who cannot answer your question is not strange. A perfectly articulate sentence that cannot answer your question, delivered by a system that has just produced ten such sentences in a row that could answer it, is strange in a way that demands an account. The account is the conjecture. The system is not in cognitive contact with what its sentences are about. The contact is not lacking by degree. It is lacking by kind.

We are looking at something. We are not looking at a thinker. The honest discipline is the one that says so.

Go Deeper into the Circus

There is a sentence cosmologists have been saying for thirty years, and they are still saying it, and the version they say in 2026 is the version that gives the game away. The sentence is: at a sufficiently large scale, the universe will smooth out.

The sentence is structural. It is doing work. It is the same work, performed in the opposite direction, as a sentence theologians used to say: at a sufficiently deep level of explanation, God is required. We named that move. We named it almost a century ago. We called it the god of the gaps, and once it had a name, the people deploying it could no longer deploy it without being seen. The phrase did not refute any particular theological claim. It identified the shape of a class of claims — the pattern of placing the contested commitment in whatever territory had not yet been mapped, and retreating it further as the maps got better.

The Copernican principle, in the form it is now defended, is the inverse of that move. Same epistemic architecture. Opposite vector. The god of the gaps retreats into the unknown. The Copernican principle, as currently deployed, retreats past it — out beyond the next scale, out beyond the next survey, out beyond whatever horizon has not yet returned data. The claim that gets protected is not the existence of a deity. It is the non-existence of a location. We are not anywhere in particular. We are not in a place with features. The data showing that we appear to be in such a place is local, parochial, soon to be smoothed out by observations at a scale we have not yet reached.

Call it what it is. Copernicus of the insufficient scale horizon.

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The empirics have been piling up for a decade and they are not isolated. The KBC void is real and direct-tested; we appear to live inside a region roughly twenty percent underdense out to a billion light years, and Banik’s local-void solution to the Hubble tension keeps outperforming ΛCDM in head-to-head comparisons. The cosmic dipole anomaly has crossed five sigma in the radio counts; the matter rest frame and the radiation rest frame are not, in fact, the same frame, and the discrepancy is now a structural feature of the data rather than a curiosity at the edge of significance. The axis of evil — the alignment of the CMB quadrupole and octupole with the ecliptic and with each other — survived WMAP, survived Planck, survived every systematic anyone could throw at it, and continues to point at the embarrassing thing: a large-scale anisotropy that rhymes with our orbital plane. The Big Ring at nine billion light years and the Giant Arc sit above the homogeneity bound the standard cosmology requires. Sagittarius A* keeps failing to look like a clean Kerr black hole and keeps looking like something else — a compact dark-matter soliton, a boson star, an object whose existence the standard story does not predict.

Each one taken alone is an anomaly. Together they are a portrait. The portrait is of a place with structure: a local void, a real axis, a matter frame that is not the radiation frame, a central object that is not the generic object the textbook predicted. We sit inside a galaxy whose center is anomalous, inside a void that is not supposed to exist at this depth, embedded in a cosmos whose largest measurable directional feature points at our ecliptic. The probability that all of these are coincidences in a universe that has no features is the kind of probability physicists describe with the word vanishing when the conclusion is one they want to draw, and with the word fluctuation when the conclusion is one they do not.

The response from the field has been to retreat. Not at the level of any individual physicist — many of them are honest, and some are doing the right work — but at the level of the consensus posture. The retreat has a shape. In 2005 the Copernican principle was a finding. The community had looked at the data and concluded that, to a first approximation, we were not in a privileged location. By 2015 the principle had become a working assumption. Let us proceed as if we are not special, since the alternative is intractable. By 2026 it has become something else again: a regulative ideal, a thing the community knows will be vindicated at the next horizon, whatever the current data says. That is not how a scientific claim degrades. That is how a doctrine degrades. The protective belt thickens with each successive disconfirmation, and the core proposition is never updated, never falsifiable in principle, never available to the data.

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The structural identity with the god of the gaps is precise. The theological move worked like this: place the deity in the unexplained. As the unexplained shrinks, retreat the deity. The bacterial flagellum gets an evolutionary account; the deity moves. Lightning becomes meteorology; the deity moves. The heart becomes hydraulics; the deity moves. Eventually the serious theologians notice that the deity is being defined by a moving boundary rather than by any positive claim, and they stop. The move becomes unusable in front of anyone who can name it.

The Copernican move works the same way. Place the principle in the unobserved. As the observed expands, retreat the principle. The local supervoid? That will smooth out. The dipole anomaly? That will smooth out. The quadrupole alignment? Future surveys will show it was a statistical fluctuation. The Big Ring? Wait for Euclid. The Hubble tension? Wait for the next CMB mission. Each individual finding gets the interesting anomaly treatment, with the assurance that the next horizon will absorb it. The horizon keeps moving. The principle keeps retreating. And the central proposition — that we are not in a location with features — is held safe from the data by being defined as the thing that will be true somewhere we have not yet measured.

There is a name for this kind of move and the name is not science. The name is creed. A scientific claim states the conditions of its own falsification. A creed states the conditions of its own perpetual rescue. The Copernican principle as a finding — we have looked, here is what we see, we are not at a literal center — is a scientific claim. The Copernican principle as deployed in defense of itself against the cumulative anomalies of 2026 is something else. It is the assertion that whatever the data says now, the principle remains true at a scale not yet observed. That is the structure of a faith adjusting to disconfirmation. Lakatos called it the protective belt. When the belt gets thicker every decade and the core never updates, you are not looking at a research program. You are looking at a worldview being defended by people who are doing physics inside it.

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The fear is real, and the fear is the tell. The strength of the resistance is the giveaway. Physicists do not exhibit this kind of motivated reasoning about, say, the matter power spectrum at intermediate scales. They exhibit it on exactly the topics where the answer would mean we are somewhere, we are something, we are looked-at. The Copernican principle is doing work no scientific principle is supposed to do. It is functioning as theodicy. It is the immune response of a worldview that built its self-image on the we are nothing special posture and that has spent three generations metabolizing the cultural authority of that posture into popular books, lab-coat liturgies, and the substitute meaning-frame of the pale blue dot. If the cosmos turns out to have a here, all of that gets renegotiated. Not falsified — renegotiated. And the people who would have to renegotiate it are mostly the same people who would have to admit that they were doing metaphysics in a voice that brooked no disagreement, while telling the public that the metaphysics had been settled by observation.

The philosophical alternative is not even the embarrassing one. It is not therefore God. It is therefore we do not yet know what kind of structure we are inside, and we will have to learn a kind of cosmology in which the observer’s position is a parameter rather than an embarrassment. That is just normal physics. The field has done this before, several times. It will do it again. The blockage is not technical. The blockage is that the loose thread, once pulled, walks back through every assumption that was load-bearing for the purposeless deterministic accident story. The dark energy whose physical basis has never been found. The fine-tuning that the multiverse was invented to defuse. The arrow of time that nobody has explained. The measurement problem. The hard problem of consciousness. These are not unrelated holes. They are the same hole seen from different angles. The Copernican principle, in its current functional form, is what is keeping them from being seen together.

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The pattern is not confined to cosmology. Once you have the formulation — X of the insufficient horizon — the move becomes visible across every field that built its self-image on the we are nothing special posture and is now being slowly contradicted by its own findings.

Evolutionary biology has a version: all behavior is explainable by reproductive fitness at some descriptive level not yet fully worked out. The adaptationist horizon retreats as the spandrels, the genuine puzzles of altruism, the persistence of art and ritual pile up. Neuroscience has a version: consciousness will turn out to be illusory at some computational level not yet specified. The eliminativist horizon retreats as the hard problem refuses to dissolve under any of the proposed reductions. Economics has a version: markets will turn out to be efficient at some informational scale not yet measured. The efficient-markets horizon retreats with every behavioral finding, every cascade, every documented case of price detached from value.

They are all the same epistemic structure. They are all the inverse of the god of the gaps. They are all the defensive retreat of a worldview commitment to a scale, a level, a horizon that has not yet returned data, accompanied by the confidence that when it does, the commitment will be vindicated. The Copernican case is the cleanest specimen because the horizon is literal and the retreat can be geometrically tracked: this many megaparsecs, then this many gigaparsecs, then the observable universe itself, beyond which there is no further scale to which the retreat can go. The CMB is the last-scattering surface. There is no horizon further out. Euclid, the Rubin LSST decade, SKA, CMB-S4 — the surveys that will close the case, one way or the other, are already running or imminent. The believers think the rescue is coming. The data is, increasingly, not cooperating.

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Watch the language. Once a community can no longer hold a doctrine in its strong form, it does not usually renounce the doctrine. It redefines the words. The next phase of the Copernican retreat will be a quiet weakening of what Copernican means. The original claim was that our location has no special features. The weakened version, already audible in some quarters, is that we are not at a literal geometric center — a much weaker claim, one that nothing in the current data threatens, and one that can be defended indefinitely because it was never the contested claim to begin with. The strong claim gets discarded. The word stays. The faithful are reassured that the principle still holds, because the word still appears in the textbook. The fact that the word now means something it did not mean a generation ago goes unremarked.

This is what a religious community does with a creed it can no longer defend but cannot afford to renounce. The Apostles’ Creed gets recited; the meanings of the words have drifted for centuries; the recitation continues to confer community identity, and the original content is held only by specialists who can be safely ignored. The Copernican principle is on the same trajectory. The serious cosmologists know what is happening. The popularizers do not. The popular books will go on saying we are not special long after the field has quietly accepted that the local data says otherwise. The phrase will be load-bearing in the wrong sense — it will be holding up a story the science no longer supports.

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The honest move — the one a physicist who took the data at face value would already be making — is to flip the framing. Stop asking how do we recover the principle. Start asking what is the universe’s actual symmetry group, if it is not the FLRW group we assumed? Once you ask the question that way, the anomalies stop being anomalies. They become data about the answer. The dipole tells you about the matter frame. The void tells you about the local geometry. The quadrupole alignment tells you about a real axis. The compact object at the galactic center tells you what the local gravitational regime actually does. The Hubble tension stops being a tension and becomes the signal of the inhomogeneity you should have been modeling all along.

That cosmology is not threatening. It is just harder. It requires giving up the FLRW shortcut and doing real inhomogeneous cosmology. It requires treating the observer’s position as a parameter the theory has to account for. It requires admitting that the universe might have features — a here, a there, an axis, a structure — and that physics is the discipline that maps such features rather than the one that asserts they cannot exist. None of this is metaphysically loaded. It is metaphysically loaded only against a prior commitment, and the prior commitment is not science. It is the inheritance of three centuries of we are nothing, which served a purpose in its time and is now serving as the protective belt around an empirical position that the data is not supporting.

The next time someone says at a sufficiently large scale this will all smooth out, the response is no longer to argue about whether it will. The response is to name the move. That is Copernicus of the insufficient scale horizon. Please show your work, or stop deploying the move. This is what naming patterns does. It does not refute any specific claim. It identifies a class of claims, and once the class is identified, the members of the class can no longer be used in good faith without acknowledgment.

The god of the gaps did not end theology. It ended one kind of bad theology. It cleared the ground for theology that could be done without retreating into the unobserved with every advance. The same job needs doing in cosmology now, and in the adjacent fields where the same move is being made under different banners. The principle that is doing the work of a creed needs to be retired from that work. The principle that does the work of a finding can stay. The distinction matters because the data is no longer going to let us pretend they are the same.

We are looking at something. The honest discipline is the one that asks what.

Go Deeper into the Circus

Watch this.

The man is Gary Stevenson, a former Citi trader who walked away from the desk, wrote The Trading Game, and now runs Garys Economics on YouTube. The video is thirty-nine minutes on why The Economist hates wealth taxes. I would not normally hand my readers a thirty-nine minute video. Watch this one.

Stevenson does, on the economic-intellectual apparatus, exactly what these pages have been doing on the political-constitutional apparatus. He takes the stated position of the captured intellectual class — wealth taxes bad, inheritance taxes acceptable — and he runs the math on it. The math reveals that for the only people the wealth tax targets, the wealth tax and the inheritance tax are the same instrument applied at different intervals. The position the credentialed economic class has staked out is, on its own arithmetic, not an argument. It is a performance of intellectual seriousness covering for a structural commitment to the inheritocracy the same class spends its other paragraphs claiming to oppose.

This is the Sarah Isgur move, performed in a different register on a different apparatus. The same shape. The same sincerity. The same operative-class signature in which the specific question is converted into a general structural claim that has no answer. We are against inequality, but we cannot do the only thing that would address it. The conversion is the work the position exists to perform.

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What Stevenson has, that almost no American writer in the comparable register has managed to acquire, is the authority of having sat inside the apparatus he is now describing. He traded the relevant instruments. He knows what the numbers do. He knows what the wealth dynamics produce because he was, for several years, one of the people producing them. The credential is uncounterable. The captured intellectual class can dismiss academics for being academic and activists for being activist and politicians for being political. They have not yet figured out how to dismiss a former star trader who simply will not stop running the math in public.

The video is also a master class in something I have been thinking about for a while, which is the question of how a person communicates a structural argument to an audience that has been trained to dismiss structural arguments as the resentment of the losers. Stevenson’s answer is to refuse the framing entirely. He does not appeal to fairness. He does not appeal to morality. He appeals to your own asset position. He says, to his middle-class viewer, if you do not tax the very rich, they will own everything, and you will own nothing, and your kids will own nothing, and the math is the math. The argument is delivered in the register of self-interest properly understood. It is the Tocquevillian register of the long view, the recognition that one’s own welfare is structurally entangled with the welfare of a class one would otherwise be tempted to look down on. Stevenson is doing in the economic domain what these pages have been trying to do in the political-constitutional domain. The diagnostic axes are complementary. The voices are complementary. The work is the same work.

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I want to flag two specific moments in the video that I think are the load-bearing ones.

The first is the lifecycle-savings reframe. Stevenson notes that ordinary people accumulate wealth through their working lives and then disaccumulate it through retirement and end-of-life care, so that the wealth they hold at death is much smaller than the wealth they held at peak. The inheritance tax, applied to ordinary people, mostly catches nothing because there is nothing left to catch. But the very rich, whose wealth derives from asset returns rather than wages, accumulate continuously and pass everything to their heirs. For them the wealth tax and the inheritance tax are mathematically identical taxes applied at different intervals. The intellectual class’s preference for the latter over the former is therefore not a substantive preference at all. It is a preference for the version that is politically harder to enact, conducted by people who claim to want the substantive outcome the easier version would deliver.

This is the cleanest demonstration of legal formalism as political ideology, applied to economics, that I have seen in any popular venue. It is the diagnostic the publication has been making across Economic Royalists, Business Ought Never Be Politics, and The Sovereign Individual Was The Blueprint, rendered in arithmetic that no honest reader can refute. The Economist’s position is exposed not as wrong but as not-an-argument. The position is the position. The exposure is the work.

The second is the closing arc — first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win — which Stevenson applies to his own trajectory and to the trajectory of the wealth-tax argument in Anglophone politics. The relevant fact about the closing arc is not the sentiment. The relevant fact is that The Economist devoting two pages of its cover package to fighting wealth taxes is itself the documentary evidence that the apparatus has moved from laughing to fighting. The apparatus does not waste its prestige on fights it does not have to have. The apparatus is having this fight because the apparatus has noticed that the argument is winning. Stevenson is right to read the fight as evidence of his own position’s strength. The captured intellectual class is now visibly straining against the argument, and the strain is exposing what the class is actually for.

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You should watch the video. You should send it to anyone you know who reads The Economist and treats it as serious analysis rather than as the house organ of the inheritocracy. You should consider, if you have not, whether the credentialed intellectual class you have been deferring to on questions of economic policy is the appropriate authority on the question of whether the structural conditions of your own family’s life are sustainable. The answer is increasingly clearly no. The voice that is willing to say so, in arithmetic that survives scrutiny, is Stevenson’s. There are very few like him. Watch the video.

That is all I came to say.

Go Deeper into the Circus

There is a question that comes to most people in middle life, and it comes quietly, usually late at night, usually after a stretch of work that has required the person to be more than they were before. The question is: how many true friends have I actually had?

The question is the wrong shape, but it has to be asked in its wrong shape first, because the wrong shape is the shape the culture has given us. The culture trains us to count. It trains us from childhood to count playmates, to count birthday-party guests, to count followers, to count contacts, to count likes, to count the people who showed up to the wedding, to count the people who showed up to the funeral. The count is supposed to mean something. The count is supposed to be the score by which the question of whether one was loved gets answered.

The count does not mean what we have been told it means. The count, when it is honest, is almost always small. The count, when it is honest, is almost always smaller than the person doing the counting expected. And the smallness, when first noticed, is one of the more disorienting griefs available to a person, because it arrives with the implication that the person counting is the one who has failed to be lovable, rather than the much more accurate implication, which is that the count was the wrong measure all along.

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I want to begin with what almost everyone gets wrong about friendship, which is the conflation of the functional ring with the inner ring.

Most of the people who circulate through a life are functional. They are colleagues, acquaintances, neighbors, fellow-travelers, business contacts, members of the same scene, attendees of the same parties. They occupy a real category. The category has its own pleasures and its own etiquette and its own kinds of care. People in the functional ring will, on occasion, do something genuinely kind. They will remember a birthday. They will send a condolence card. They will buy a round of drinks. The kindness is real and the kindness is also bounded. The kindness is the kindness the role permits. When the role ends — when one of the parties changes jobs or moves cities or stops attending the same events — the kindness ends with it, in almost every case, almost without exception. This is not a betrayal. This is what the functional ring is.

The error most people make, particularly in their twenties and thirties, is to mistake the functional ring for the inner ring. The error happens because the functional ring is much larger and much louder and much more present in daily life than the inner ring. The error happens because the functional ring performs many of the surface behaviors of friendship — sharing meals, laughing together, being present at significant occasions — without the underlying structure that distinguishes the functional from the friendly. The error happens, also, because the culture rewards the appearance of having a large functional ring with status markers that look like the markers of being loved. The popular person is treated as the loved person. The well-connected person is treated as the surrounded person. The mistake is invisible until the day the functional ring is needed for something only the inner ring can do, and the functional ring isn’t there, and the person discovers, all at once, that they have been miscounting their whole life.

This is the disorientation that comes in middle life. It is not, in the structural sense, a discovery that one is less loved than one believed. It is a discovery that one has been counting the wrong category. The actual count of the inner ring has always been small. The actual count of the inner ring is small for almost everyone. The functional ring was always functional. The conflation was the error.

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There is a worse thing, though, and it is the thing that hurts more than the miscounting, and I want to be honest about it because it is what most people are actually grieving when they say they have had few true friends.

The worse thing is the experience of generosity exploited.

A person of certain temperament — and I am thinking here of the people I have most loved, the people whose company has most rewarded me, the people whose absence has cost me the most — will give more than they have been asked for. They will give time. They will give money. They will give attention. They will give their own work, freely, to anyone who shows up needing it. They will give the benefit of the doubt past the point where the benefit has been earned. They will give explanations of things they understand to people who have asked badly. They will give care to people whose self-presentation has not earned it. They will give, in short, generously, the way generous people give, which is to say without first auditing whether the recipient is the kind of person who can receive generosity without converting it into something else.

The conversion is the problem. There exists a kind of person who cannot receive generosity. They cannot receive it because the receipt of it would constitute an admission, intolerable to them, that they were in some way in need of what was given. The receipt would constitute a kind of debt. The debt, in their psychic economy, is a position of inferiority. They cannot tolerate the inferiority. So they perform an operation on the gift. The operation converts the gift into something else. The gift becomes evidence of the giver’s neediness, the giver’s loneliness, the giver’s compulsion, the giver’s failure of self-regulation. The gift becomes a story about the giver in which the giver, having given so much, must be the person with less worth. The story relieves the recipient of the debt by inverting the structural asymmetry. The recipient is no longer the indebted party. The recipient is the discerning observer who has noticed that the giver is the diminished one.

This move is more common than people realize, particularly among the people whose temperaments draw them to ambitious, generous, creatively prolific people. The ambitious generous person attracts a certain ring of people who circulate around them in part because the ambitious generous person is the source of things — opportunities, ideas, attention, gifts. The ring takes the things and then, behind the back of the ambitious generous person, builds the story about the giver. They give too much. They need too much. They are too much. The ring tells itself this story for years, and the story circulates inside the ring, and the story is the thing that makes the ring tolerable to itself, because the story converts the asymmetry of giving and receiving into a story in which the receiving party is the morally superior party, the one with self-possession, the one with appropriate boundaries, the one with the discernment to see that the giver is the deficient one.

The giver, in the meantime, does not know any of this is happening. The giver feels, periodically, a low hum of being slightly diminished by the ring, a sense of being treated as if their generosity were the symptom of a problem they had rather than the offering they meant it to be, but the giver cannot quite locate the source of the hum, because the ring is performing friendship at the surface level, and the surface looks fine. The giver keeps giving. The ring keeps converting. The asymmetry deepens. The giver feels more and more diminished without being able to name what is diminishing them. The hum grows. Eventually, something breaks — sometimes the breakage is the giver’s, sometimes the ring’s, sometimes a single member of the ring goes too far in the diminishment and the giver finally sees it clearly — and the giver looks back over the years and realizes that what they thought was friendship was an asymmetric exchange in which they were the resource and the ring was the consumer, and that the ring had been telling itself stories about them, behind their backs, for as long as the ring had existed.

This is the moment of grief I have been describing. The moment is brutal. The brutality is not only the discovery of what was happening. The brutality is the retroactive rewriting of years of one’s life. The dinners. The gifts. The kindnesses. The trips one took. The careers one helped to launch. The opportunities one passed to people. The introductions. The midnight calls. All of it now bearing, in retrospect, a different meaning than the one one believed at the time. The cumulative weight of the rewriting is what produces, in middle life, the sense that one has had fewer friends than one believed. The sense is accurate. The friends one believed one had were, in many cases, members of the ring that was converting the giving into a story about the giver. The actual friends were always fewer, and the actual friends were the ones who, during the same period, were giving back — not in equal measure, because equal measure is not the metric, but in the only metric that finally counts, which is presence.

⁂

I want to say what the metric is, because it is the thing that gets lost in the count.

The metric is not symmetry of exchange. Friendships are not commercial relationships and they cannot be evaluated by audit. The metric is also not similarity of temperament or shared interests or compatible schedules or any of the surface features that the culture suggests friendships should have. The metric is one specific thing.

The metric is: would this person, when the chips were down, take an action that exposed them to my anger, because they loved me enough that the risk was acceptable?

This is the inner-ring test. Almost no one passes it. Most people, when the chips are down, will protect their own comfort. They will withdraw. They will fail to call. They will fail to show up. They will fail to do the harder thing, which is the thing that the situation requires but that the friendship may not survive. They will not, when one is in trouble, reach out to one’s spouse. They will not, when one is in crisis, fly across the country. They will not, when one has gone silent, sit with the silence until it breaks. They will excuse themselves. They will tell themselves they are giving space. They will tell themselves they don’t want to intrude. They will tell themselves a story in which their own withdrawal is the appropriate response. The story is wrong, but it is the story almost everyone tells themselves, because almost no one is willing to risk the friendship for the friend.

The few people who pass the test are the inner ring. They are the friends. They are the count that counts. They are usually two or three. They are sometimes one. They are sometimes, in certain configurations of life, a spouse and one other person, or a sibling and one other person, or a parent and one other person, and almost never more than three or four. The number is small because the test is hard. Most people cannot pass it.

The count being small is not the indictment most people read it as. The count being small is the count being honest. A person with three friends, by this measure, has more than almost anyone alive. A person with one friend, by this measure, is in the company of most of the writers and thinkers and artists and quiet workers of the world, who have known one friend, deeply, and who have done the work of their lives in the support of that one friendship. A person with no one passing the test is in genuine isolation, and that is a real condition with a real name, but it is not the condition most people are in when they report having few friends. Most people, when they look honestly, have one or two. The one or two have been doing the work of the inner ring the whole time. The grief is for the ring of people one believed were the inner ring and who turned out to be something else.

⁂

What does one do, in middle life, when one has discovered the miscount?

There is the obvious thing, which is to grieve the loss. The grief is real and the grief should not be skipped. The years one gave to the ring are years one cannot get back. The opportunities one extended to people who used them poorly are opportunities one cannot recover. The kindness one gave that was converted into stories about one’s deficiency is kindness that cannot be reclaimed. Some part of one’s working life is gone because it was spent on people who were never the right people. The grief is for that part of one’s life.

There is the harder thing, which is to revise one’s giving without becoming closed. The closed posture — I will never give again, I will audit every relationship, I will protect myself — is the posture that the people who exploited one’s generosity have, by their behavior, encouraged in one. The closed posture would represent their final victory. Their stories about one’s deficiency would, in the closed posture, finally come true: one would become the small, audited, defensive person they always claimed one was. The closed posture is the trap.

The right thing is harder. The right thing is to keep giving, but to give differently. To give to the people who can receive. To stop giving to the ring. To recognize, when the ring shows up, that the ring is the ring, and to be courteous to the ring without surrendering one’s actual resources to it. To recognize that the inner ring is the inner ring, and to invest in it with the seriousness it has always deserved. To give one’s deepest self only to the people who can hold it without converting it. To accept that this means a smaller circle, a smaller life in one sense, and a much larger life in the only sense that finally matters, which is the depth of presence with the few people who can actually be present.

There is also the recognition, painful but freeing, that one’s own generosity was never the problem. The problem was the recipients. The generosity is the right disposition. The generosity is, in fact, the thing one was put on the earth to have. The generosity will be one’s gift to the inner ring for the rest of one’s life, and the inner ring will receive it as gift, because the inner ring is composed of the people who can. The functional ring will continue to circulate. One will continue to give to the functional ring what the functional ring is owed, which is courtesy, professional respect, fair dealing, and one’s competent work. One will not give the functional ring one’s deepest self anymore. The deepest self goes to the inner ring. That is the rule.

⁂

The last thing I want to say is about what friendship actually is, because the count question and the exploitation question and the inner-ring question all get clearer when one names what the thing is one has been talking about.

Friendship is the relationship in which one person’s continued existence is, for another person, a load-bearing fact about the universe.

This is a heavy formulation and I mean it heavily. The friend is the person whose presence in the world changes the structure of the world for you. If they were not there, the world would be a different world. If they died, something irrecoverable would be lost, and the loss would not be a loss of utility or function or pleasure but a loss of the architecture of reality as you have been inhabiting it. The friend is woven into your sense of what is real. The friend is the person you would call if the unspeakable happened. The friend is the person you would want to be holding you if the lights were turning off. The friend is the person whose voice, recognized in a crowd, would make you turn your head before you knew why.

By this definition, friendship is much rarer than the culture admits and much more weighty than the culture rewards. The culture rewards the appearance of social abundance. The culture does not have language for the small dense fact of one or two people who are the actual structure of one’s life. The culture is wrong about this. The structure is the structure. The appearance is the appearance. The count, when it is honest, is the count of the structure, and the structure is almost always small.

A life with two such people in it is a fortunate life. A life with one such person in it is a complete life. A life with none of them is a life in which one is still building toward the structure, or in which one has lost it and is grieving it, or in which one was raised in conditions that made the building impossible and is now doing the slow work of becoming the kind of person who can build it. None of these conditions is shameful. All of them are common. The cultural mythology of the wide friend group is a lie that makes all of these conditions feel like personal failures, when they are, in their actual structural shape, conditions of being human.

⁂

If you are sitting with the count tonight, and the count is smaller than you expected, I would say this. The count is almost certainly correct. The grief about the count is correct, too — it is appropriate to grieve the years given to the ring that was not the ring, and it is appropriate to grieve the people who appeared to be in the inner ring and who turned out not to be. The grief is the work.

But underneath the grief, when the grief has done what it does, is the structural fact that the inner ring is the inner ring. It has always been small. It will probably always be small. The smallness is not the indictment. The smallness is the honesty. The inner ring’s loyalty to you is the count that counts. The inner ring is, in almost every life, the people who, when the chips were down, took the risk that exposed them. They are the people one should be giving one’s deepest self to for the remainder of one’s working life.

The functional ring will continue to circulate. The functional ring will continue to perform the surface of friendship. The functional ring may even, on occasion, still wound. Let them. They are not the people who count. The people who count are the people whose continued existence is, for you, a load-bearing fact about the universe. Those are the friends. Those are the ones the word was meant for.

The count is the count. The count, when it is honest, is enough.

That is all I came to say.

Go Deeper into the Circus

The word has been ruined by the people who use it most. Loyalty, in the contemporary American political vocabulary, has come to mean the operative’s willingness to serve a principal — a candidate, a faction, a party, a movement — without regard to the cost the service imposes on anyone else, including the country. This is loyalty as the mob understands it. This is omertà. This is the loyalty Donald Trump demands of his attorneys general and the loyalty he is currently extracting from Pam Bondi and Kash Patel and J.D. Vance and the rest of the people on that July 17 speakerphone.

But the word had another meaning once, an older meaning, the meaning it carries in the constitutional oath. The oath is to the Constitution. Not to the man who appointed you. Not to the party that elevated you. Not to the movement that credentialed you. To the Constitution. Loyalty, in the oath’s sense, is fidelity to a structure that exists prior to any particular officeholder and that will exist after every particular officeholder is gone. It is the discipline of placing the country’s continuing form above the immediate interests of the faction one happens to belong to.

These two meanings of loyalty are not compatible. A person can occupy one or the other. The people who try to occupy both end up, inevitably, occupying the first while talking about the second. They end up, that is, where Sarah Isgur is.

⁂

I have written about Sarah Isgur before. That piece described the structural answer to the question of who she works for — the conservative legal movement that produced her career, the doctrines that movement constructed, the audience the movement cultivated. The piece treated her with care. It declined to call her the villain. It named her as the diagnostic case for what the Never Trump conservative position requires of its most articulate practitioners.

This piece is harder. This piece is about what happened on the Dispatch Podcast on Friday, June 12, 2026, when Stephen Hayes and Michael Warren and Kevin Williamson and Sarah Isgur sat down to discuss the Epstein-files cover-up that the New York Times Magazine documented two days earlier and that I wrote about as the orbit-fracture the day after the excerpt dropped. The episode is called How the Epstein Files Stumped the White House. The title is wrong. The files did not stump the White House. The White House suppressed the files. There is a difference.

Isgur, on that podcast, spent forty minutes performing a particular cognitive operation in real time, in front of three colleagues who became visibly more confused as the operation proceeded. The operation was to convert the specific question — did Bondi and Patel suppress evidence at Vance’s direction — into a general question. The general question was: wouldn’t any administration, faced with the same fact pattern, do exactly the same thing? The general question has no answer. That is why she chose it.

This is the move. Watch it carefully because it is the load-bearing structural element of everything she does. The specific question implicates specific people in specific acts. The general question dissolves the specific people into a structural claim about how anyone in their position would behave. The specific question demands accountability. The general question forecloses it. The specific question is what journalism is for. The general question is what operatives say when journalism is closing in.

Hayes was confused. Warren was confused. Williamson was confused. They were still trying to discuss what Bondi and Patel had actually done. Isgur had already moved on to what Bondi and Patel were structurally compelled to do. They were in different conversations. Hers was the conversation in which no one is responsible because everyone would have done the same thing.

⁂

I want to be careful about what I am claiming. I am not claiming Sarah Isgur is lying. I am not even claiming she is being cynical. I am claiming something stranger and, I think, sadder.

I am claiming she cannot afford to know.

There is a third position between she believes it and she is lying about it, and the third position is where most of the operative class lives. The third position is that she has constructed, over fifteen years of professional life, a cognitive architecture that routes around a particular question. The question is whether the institutions she has worked inside — the Department of Justice under Sessions and Rosenstein, the Republican political infrastructure that selected and credentialed her, the Federalist Society pipeline that placed her in those positions, the conservative legal movement that built the doctrines she now performs as professional analysis — function, in their actual operational behavior, the way she presents them as functioning.

The question, asked plainly, is whether the apparatus she has spent her career inside is a constitutional apparatus serving the country or a partisan apparatus serving a faction. The cheap version of the question lets her off because it admits of degree. The serious version of the question does not. The serious version asks whether the apparatus she has served has, at the load-bearing moments, served the Constitution or the party. The answer determines whether her professional life has been what she says it has been.

She cannot answer the question. So she has built a life in which the question never comes up. The Friday podcast is what it looks like when the question comes up anyway and the architecture strains against it.

⁂

There is a specific episode in Sarah Isgur’s career that the larger architecture exists, in part, to keep submerged. The episode is the Lisa Page leak.

In December 2017, Sarah Isgur was Director of the Office of Public Affairs at the Department of Justice and Senior Counsel to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. The Russia investigation was active. Rosenstein was scheduled to testify before the House Judiciary Committee. The night before the testimony, a selected set of text messages between FBI lawyer Lisa Page and FBI agent Peter Strzok — cherry-picked from a larger corpus, decontextualized, the most damaging-looking ones isolated — were provided to a handful of Trump-aligned reporters. The reporters were called into the DOJ that night. The story broke the next morning. Rosenstein testified into a media environment that the leak had reframed.

The leaker was Sarah Isgur. We know this because Lisa Page eventually said so, in print, in her own account of what happened to her. Page wrote, in The Daily Beast, that Isgur was the person who selected the texts, decided which to release, and convened the reporters. Isgur has, to my knowledge, never publicly contested Page’s account.

The leak was not a freelance act. The leak was, at minimum, sanctioned by the political leadership of the Department. It was timed, it was targeted, and it was strategic. It damaged Page personally — her marriage, her career, her life — and it damaged the Russia investigation institutionally, which is the thing it was intended to do. It worked as designed.

This is the documentary case. This is what loyalty looks like when loyalty means to the party. The leak did not serve the Constitution. The leak served a particular political project — the project of damaging the institutional credibility of the FBI’s Russia investigation in order to make the Mueller probe survivable for the people the probe was investigating. The project was a Republican Party project. The leak was a Republican Party act, conducted from inside the Department of Justice, by an official whose oath was to the Constitution and whose paycheck was signed by the United States.

The Lisa Page episode is not a footnote. It is the load-bearing fact. It is the documentary instance of the pattern the entire subsequent career has been arranged to avoid asking about. The Advisory Opinions register, the Dispatch legal-craft polish, the SCOTUSblog editorship, the ABC News analyst chair, the National Security Institute affiliation — all of it is the architecture that holds the Lisa Page question at bay. Each new credential is one more reason not to look back. Each new platform is one more incentive structure that rewards her for not asking. Each new appearance is another performance of the persona that the unasked question makes possible.

⁂

The Friday podcast is what it looks like when the architecture meets a fact pattern that exactly recapitulates the Lisa Page pattern.

July 17, 2025, Situation Room. J.D. Vance in the chair. Pam Bondi on the speakerphone. Kash Patel on the speakerphone. Susie Wiles in the room. Documents on the table that implicate the President and his political network in the Epstein matter. A decision made about what to release, what to withhold, what to release in a form that would damage selected enemies, what to release in a form that would protect selected friends. The Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the political leadership of the Executive Branch, working together to determine how the documentary record would be presented in order to serve the political interests of the people in the room.

This is the Lisa Page pattern. The names are different. The party in power is the same. The institutional behavior is identical. The Department of Justice is being used, again, by a particular partisan project, to manage a documentary record in service of the project’s survival.

Sarah Isgur, asked to analyze this on Friday, could not analyze it. She could not analyze it because the analysis would require her to recognize the pattern. The pattern is the pattern she was part of in 2017. To name it now would be to name it then. To name it then would be to dismantle the professional identity she has spent the intervening nine years constructing.

So she didn’t name it. She moved instead to the counterfactual. Wouldn’t any administration do this? The counterfactual abstracts the question into structural territory where no answer can be given. The counterfactual is the cognitive route around the specific case. The counterfactual is what loyalty to the party looks like when loyalty to the party has to be performed in a venue that ostensibly demands loyalty to the country.

Her co-hosts could not follow her because they were operating, in that moment, in good faith on the specific case. She was operating, in that moment, in the structural register that the architecture of her career requires her to inhabit. The confusion on the podcast was the gap between the two registers. The gap is what she has spent her career working to keep invisible. On Friday, for forty minutes, the gap was visible.

⁂

This is what I mean when I say her loyalty is to the party and not to the country.

I do not mean that she signed a piece of paper somewhere committing to the Republican Party against the Constitution. No one does that. The operative class does not work by explicit commitments. It works by selecting for, and then incentivizing, a particular cognitive architecture in which the partisan project’s interests and the country’s interests are routinely confused, in which the confusion is rewarded with credentials and platforms and book contracts and analyst chairs, and in which the recipient of the rewards comes, over time, to experience the confusion as clarity.

When Sarah Isgur converts the specific question into the general counterfactual, she is not lying. She is performing the cognitive operation that her career has trained her to perform. The performance is sincere. The performance is also what loyalty to the party, as opposed to the country, structurally looks like in someone of her credentialing and her platform and her self-presentation. The country, in her cognitive architecture, is the structure inside which the party operates. The party is the agent. The country is the field. Her loyalty is to the agent and her professional identity is to the field, and she has not noticed, because the architecture is designed to prevent her from noticing, that the agent and the field have different interests, and that the agent’s interests have been, at the load-bearing moments of her career, served at the field’s expense.

This is the structural meaning of loyalty in the operative class. It is not a choice. It is a shape. The shape is what the position is. The people inside the shape experience the shape as principle. The people outside the shape see it for what it is.

⁂

There is a question that Sarah Isgur could ask herself, and it is a simple question, and the entire architecture of her career has been arranged to prevent her from asking it.

The question is: In every load-bearing moment of my professional life, when the interests of the Republican Party and the interests of the constitutional order have diverged, which one have I actually served?

In 2017, at the Department of Justice, when the choice was between protecting a sitting Republican president from a legitimate counterintelligence investigation and protecting the institutional integrity of the investigation, she chose the President. She conducted the Lisa Page leak. She participated in the broader Sessions-Rosenstein-era project of managing the Mueller investigation’s institutional damage. She left the Department only when Sessions was fired, not before, not in protest of any particular act. She left because her principal left.

In 2019, when she pivoted to media, she pivoted to a venue — first CNN, then ABC, then The Dispatch — that allowed her to continue performing legal-craft authority while bracketing the structural questions her DOJ tenure had raised. She did not write the memoir that named what she had done. She did not testify, except where compelled. She did not say, in any venue I have been able to find, what we did to Lisa Page was wrong and I did it. The Lisa Page episode was managed, by her and by the broader operative network around her, as a survivable embarrassment rather than a defining act.

In 2025 and 2026, on Advisory Opinions and on the Dispatch Podcast, when the Trump administration’s behavior has produced a sequence of constitutional crises that exactly recapitulate the patterns of the 2017-2018 period, she has performed, again, the conversion of specific questions into general counterfactuals. She has performed the conversion in the register of legal sobriety. She has been rewarded for the performance with platforms and credentials and the Last Branch Standing book contract and the SCOTUSblog editorship and the ABC analyst chair.

At every load-bearing moment, the choice has been the same choice. The choice has been the party. The country has been the language she has used to describe the choice.

⁂

This is the diagnostic case the publication has been building, piece by piece, across the past two years. It is the same diagnostic the publication ran in Economic Royalists for the donor class and in Business Ought Never Be Politics for the executive class and in The Conspiracy Is The Cover Story for the operative class and in The Orbit Is Fracturing for the inner ring around the President. The diagnostic, in each case, is that there is a class of people whose professional identity is constructed on the load-bearing claim that they serve a structure larger than the faction that credentialed them, and whose actual operational behavior, examined at the load-bearing moments, reveals that the faction is the structure they actually serve.

Sarah Isgur is the cleanest case of this in the credentialed knowledge class because her career runs almost entirely through institutions whose ostensible commitment is to a structure prior to the party — the Department of Justice, the federal judiciary, the legal academy, the legal-analyst function on cable news and on podcasts. Each of these institutions exists, in its self-presentation, to serve the constitutional structure. Each of these institutions, in Sarah Isgur’s actual operational behavior inside it, has served the Republican Party at the load-bearing moments. The pattern is not deniable. The pattern is, in fact, what the architecture of her career is for.

The cost of the architecture is that the country gets, in moments of constitutional emergency, an operative-class legal-analyst function that converts every specific question of accountability into a general counterfactual about how anyone in the position would behave. The country gets, that is, a class of professionals who cannot, by virtue of their own structural position, do the work the moment requires. The work of the moment is the specific question. The structural position can only do the general counterfactual. The country waits and the moment passes and the specific question does not get answered, and the people who should have answered it appear, in the meantime, on the podcasts and on the cable shows, performing the legal-analyst function with all the appropriate polish.

⁂

I do not write this with hostility. I write it because the diagnostic is the diagnostic and the moment requires it. Sarah Isgur is not, in the moral universe of this publication, the worst person in Washington. She is, structurally, more honest than most of the people occupying similar positions, because the Never Trump posture has at least required her to articulate, repeatedly and publicly, where the contemporary right has gone wrong. That is more than the partisans of the right have done. That is more than many of the partisans of the left have done about their own apparatus.

But the Never Trump posture has a limit, and the limit is what this piece is about. The limit is that the posture cannot reach the structural question about its own apparatus. The posture can name the Trumpist insurgency. The posture cannot name the forty-year project that produced the conditions inside which the Trumpist insurgency became possible, because the people performing the posture are the products and the practitioners of the project. The project produced their credentials, their networks, their professional identities, their entire cognitive architecture. To name the project is to dismantle the identity. The identity, in their experience, is the principle. They cannot do it.

So they continue, sincerely, to perform the analysis the project requires of them. They continue, sincerely, to convert specific questions into general counterfactuals. They continue, sincerely, to occupy the legal-analyst function on the podcasts and the cable shows and the analyst chairs. They continue, sincerely, to write the books and edit the blogs and host the shows. The architecture of their career continues to reward them for the performance. The country continues to get, at the load-bearing moments, the counterfactual instead of the answer.

This is what loyalty to the party, rather than the country, looks like in the credentialed knowledge class in 2026. It does not look like a confession of loyalty. It looks like the calm professional analysis on the Friday podcast, in which the specific question about Bondi and Patel and Vance and the suppressed Epstein documents is dissolved, by a person of high professional polish and visible sincerity, into a general structural claim about how any administration would behave under the same conditions. Her co-hosts are confused because they are still in the specific question. She is in the structural one. The structural one has no answer. That is why she is in it.

⁂

The question I would put to Sarah Isgur, if I had her ear, is a simple one, and it is the question the entire architecture of her career has been arranged to prevent her from being asked.

The question is: Whose interests have you actually served, at the load-bearing moments?

The answer is in the documentary record. The Lisa Page leak is in the record. The Sessions confirmation prep is in the record. The Rosenstein-era management of the Mueller investigation is in the record. The pivot to media that bracketed the structural question is in the record. The Friday podcast counterfactual is in the record. The pattern is the pattern.

The country, by virtue of its constitutional structure, has the right to ask the people occupying its load-bearing positions whether they have been serving it or serving something else. The asking has gone out of fashion. The asking is part of what these pages have been for.

Sarah Isgur is the diagnostic case. The diagnostic case is, with appropriate substitution of names and credentials, also the case for most of the rest of the credentialed knowledge class. The asking has to happen, in public, in the venues that have not been captured by the requirement to bracket it. The asking is the first move of the work the moment requires.

That is all I came to say.

Go Deeper into the Circus